𝐨𝐤𝐚𝐲, 𝐛𝐚𝐦𝐛𝐢

𝟷𝟽. 𝚒𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚛𝚎𝚎 𝚍𝚊𝚢𝚜, 𝚑𝚎 𝚍𝚛𝚘𝚠𝚗𝚎𝚍

໑ author's note! i wrote most of this chapter while sick with covid, so please spare me if there are any typos.

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The sky here in Trost cries more in a single day than you have in your entire life.

What an odd concept but a brutally honest one nonetheless.

It's dark this morning, gloomy, skyless, and you're scurrying through campus, running off two times more caffeine than you are sleep.

Typical, Y/N. Never do you learn.

Late last night, you made the poor choice of picking up Perks of Being a Wallflower from your bookshelf and diving straight in after repeatedly hitting the submit button on a load of your assignments that were due at 11:59 p.m rather than calling it a day and going to bed when you should have.

That would have been a better choice, one of far more logic, but once you slipped your fingers into the grimy off-white pages and you cracked the thin green book open like a bottle cap, releasing sealed words made of printed ink and vivid images into the air you knew you were screwed.

In an instant, you were pulled out of your own reality and placed smack dab in the middle of the main character Charlie's messed up world intruding in on his life like you had been the one that was living it all along.

Soon, page one turned into page two hundred, all in the time span of what felt like minutes but, in reality, had been hours. The sun was beginning to rise, announcing its arrival with rays hitting your curtains before the clouds rolled in. The light of the start of the day was peering through, and your eyes hadn't even been put to rest yet.

It's not like you can blame yourself, though. Charlie's journal entries struck a nerve of familiarity in you as they read like a reflection of your own.

He chose to write to a friend who wasn't really there, while you decided to write to a universe that had developed an immoral sickening addiction to punishing you for everything that was never your fault.

Both of you and Charlie shared the similarities of finding a home in new literature, battling anxiety, suffering loss, and spending years living in a pathetic search to try and find a friend or two that you could confide in and help turn your lonely days into something more.

You both succeeded.

It's a whole different experience when there are aspects inside of a book you find yourself relating to. When you look at the words and can physically feel the meaning behind them because you once lived through something of similarity is incomparable. In a sense, it makes you feel a little less alone and a little more at home.

It's nice when you find a place to house the most broken parts of yourself, even if it's for just a small while. It offers some relief.

That's the thrill of reading. Escaping into different worlds, one's you never knew you had the desire to live, and getting so sucked into the beautiful universe the genius author so carefully crafted that you can experience an alternate life simply by skimming through paragraphs and flipping pages crinkled and creased.

With this novel, as short as it was, you felt everything there was to experience, and you wish you could have been able to experience it forever. But once the book ended, unfortunately, so did your escapism.

Now instead of gluing your eyes to pages and small letters until they burn, you are here, placed back into actuality, wandering the beautiful campus of TSU with the sun that cracked the earth at dawn, now hidden behind a blanket of grey clouds, that are spilling out rain like a faucet.