To pull at heartstrings, as they say, is no mean feat for any story. To get strangers to react a certain way, to feel almost as though it were their own experience is hardly, hardly ever simple. Yet, there are always stories: stories that make you smile, weep, roar with laughter or in anger, and stories that go very, very deep, all the way down to your core. These stories inspire you to live out your own.
I draw both hope and despair from stories. Sometimes they make me soar enlivened: I feel that everything will be alright and work out for the best, almost like a happily ever after (albeit for things slightly more mundane). Other stories make me cry out in anguish, weighing me down with the pain that the protagonists carry with them every fictional day. For stories are but a mirror into the lives of others and into the realm of "what could have been".
Perhaps it is those stories that I love best, for I feel them down to my bones, sometimes more than I feel life itself. And I wonder then, very quietly, whether I have lost my mind.
I wish these stories and the feelings they compel never let me go.
