This is what life is like. It is a fascinating novel that you are reading. You get lost in it. The characters become real, very real, very insistent, very demanding, often at cross-purposes, so it seems, and always you keep turning the pages. Always you turn one more page to see what happens. You always want to know what happens. And then there is something else that lures you on. You want to know what happens now, and you want to know what happens next.

And then the novel finishes. No more pages in this exact novel to turn. You would like the novel to continue. You have become engaged with all the characters. You want to know with certainty what happens, yet the book, in its present form, is over. You may feel stranded, that you have been dropped off a cliff, and, yet, there is the engaging feeling that the story does continue somewhere somehow. And yet that particular novel is no more.

And, so, you have to get back into your real life which is, in actuality, eternal. You are never finished with it. Only the last chapter of the fascinating book you were reading is over, and so you must go on.

Sometimes you wish the book would stop. You wish you could get done with it, and, yet, thoughts of the people and all the happenings run through your mind. They are real, so very real to you. There are dear friends and dear family or not so dear friends and not so dear family, and, yet, they have made their mark on you, and, most likely, you also made your mark on them.

What a marvelous book it was too with all its ins and outs and all the connections, the ties, the rewards and the little embarrassments and the punishments, and the events that went right, and the events that didn't, and the events that went off the page. Not all the story was told. You did plenty of reading between the lines. If you could read the book as told through someone else's eyes, it would be a quite different book. Each author writes his own book.

How to sum up the story. Perhaps you can do it in one or two short sentences. The characters in the book were born, they lived, they died, yet that is hardly the story. Page by page, day by day, so much happened, and, their bodies lived, their bodies died, that was the essential plot in twenty-five words or less, and yet the plot was nothing without the characters and how they expressed themselves and how they sought and how they found and how they and all the other characters interacted and inter-reacted. The story was a mind-bender all right, and it was a heart-reacher and heart-render. It was all a story, such a story, and, yet, a story is only a story.

Each story is unique. No two stories alike, and yet each story begins the same and seemingly ends the same, and yet there is no ending and, in truth, no beginning. It is an unending story yet, real life, true real life is something other than the story. Real life is not the nuts and bolts. It is not the twists and turns. There is a fine print in the novel that you can't quite read, and yet it is there, and you know it is there, somehow, somewhere, between the lines, it is there. A smile is a smile. A frown is a frown, and yet there is more than the tale that is told in word, deed, and action. The story goes off the page.