Figment

It is uncanny how you are every protagonist I've encountered in the books I read before I go to sleep. The grave English schoolboy with a club foot, the slobby old islander of many upsetting fetishes, a six-foot dwarf unequipped for irony, a swarthy South American alpha male who cries at the drop of a hat. Sometimes you're even the women in my books. 

For years I wondered how you could be all of these people; was I desperately in love with you and just didn't know it yet? Or did I know you so well, I could seek out these kernels of your astronomical personality as unapparent as they were to everybody else? 

But it isn't either. Quite the opposite, actually. Your face is a blank mask that doesn't twitch, not even when I'm in pain. You are these protagonists in one way and one way alone: you are all creatures cobbled together from imagination, meant to be romanced and then let go of. And when I shut my books, you crumple in a lifeless heap.

Reality is no place for your kind.

Republished from a previous blog, written in '11