The End

You're on the second to last page. There's a whole book in your left hand and in your right hand: one sheet and a flap of chip board. You've gotten this far. And you can already tell how it's going to end but there's nothing, absolutely nothing...no fire alarm, no Panera buzzer, no phone call that's going to keep you from finishing. It's not going to be pretty, you can tell by the way the rest of the Joads haven't re-surfaced and the way the family's still wandering around. You know 1.5 pages won't heal the world.

But then you finish. Carefully, gently, you let the one loose page join the rest of its family and you tuck them all back in. You close the book. It ended kind of the way you were afraid it would...yet it was so much more. You can't move. You can't breathe. But you can't help but smiling. Your life will never be the same.

And for the rest of your life that book will be on your top five. You will sing its praises in the streets. You'll buy the t-shirt. You'll nail together a soapbox, ready to whip it out if anyone...I mean anyone DARES to slander the name of the book, the story that has become a part of your life, wedged between strands of DNA that make up who you are.

Where are all the books like this? These are the books I want to read. These are the movies I want to watch. These are the stories I want to find. This is the story I want to write.