After the Story Ends

Here I sit: the lost, the abandoned one

Once again.  So many worlds

I have wandered, strange worlds.

Lured by an author, I entered the lives

Of persons I had never met,

While the author wove the tapestry

Which enfolded me

Into another world, another life.

I rode upon the characters’ laughter

With the buoyancy of a blown bubble

Floating upwards toward the sun.

I became the salt that flavored their tears.

I knew the taste of their mornings.

I knew their faces and their voices.

I knew where and why,

Though it was never mentioned,

An unseen chair lay broken.

So familiar was I with their world,

I heard the whispers

The author left unwritten.

In these places, I lived

For all the hours within the words.

Yet abruptly I am abandoned,

Shut out, cut off:

For every story ends.

Unbelieving, almost in shock,

I stare at the scene about me

Seeing what is at once too familiar

Which now I barely recognize.

My eyes search for the vanished images

From a moment before.

The scents surrounding me

Are all wrong,

No longer what they were

Only a moment before.

My ears seek again those unique sounds:

The author’s orchestra of the ordinary

Which was playing across my mind

Only a moment before.

My flesh rebels,

As if it would slough off

The present and the now

As a snake sheds

Its outgrown skin.

Here I sit:

Deep within my castle keep

Built of all the outer senses.

I am the lost,

The abandoned one,

Marooned upon reality

Which, for now, is a place

Not of my time

Not of my life.