It was one of those moments when you put down whatever you have in your hands—in your case the book you had just finished reading—and start to cry without any apparent reason. You didn’t sob out loud, but a seemingly endless stream of tears ran down your cheeks and fell onto the devil’s ivy on the windowsill as you gazed out the open window—your stare fixed on the horizon without looking at anything in particular.
You weren’t crying for the main character of the book who had, on the penultimate page, been tragically killed in a collision with a ten-ton truck while riding her bicycle home to her soon to become—yet never ever becoming—loving husband. You weren’t thinking of them. You weren’t thinking of her. You weren’t thinking of him.
You were thinking of him. He who had been such a good friend and you had loved so profoundly. He who had battled so hard for his life, but in the end, had been overcome by darker forces and pulled out of this world, way before he was due.
You were thinking of her. She who was still of this world. She who you also loved deeply. She who was so close—but yet so far away. She whose heart remained out of reach of your Cupid’s arrows.
You weren’t crying for any fictional characters. Your tears were real. Tears of this world. Not just some drops of ink on the pages of a printed book.
