Forgotten

content warning // guilt tripping, gaslighting, mentions of suicide

That feeling when you pick up a book you’ve never read before… You are completely absorbed into the story! You’re falling a little bit in love with every little thing about that world, with every single hero and villain. You are being dragged through their adventure and you feel helpless, but you love it. You love not having the option of changing something about their fictional life. It’s upsetting, you’re sad, but it’s calming.

Then you get bored with them. It’s no longer an interesting enough of a story, so you leave the book on your desk for a few hours… then, they become days… and weeks… and months… and even years. And your book finds its way on the shelf; “the forgotten shelf”. The place where all of these lonely books gather and mourn you. You are the villain. They are in deep pain, and nothing but you can make them whole again. The happiest stories you’ve ever heard of are now threatening to kill themselves. You caused this.

Your lack of discipline, lack of motivation, lack of curiosity… they killed them. They killed those stories, and now you’ll never get to find out how your favourite character turns out to make their world a better place―you killed their world, their hopes and dreams, their future. How did you dare cause so much harm? How dare you keep this going?

Many years later, you pick up the book’s corpse. It is lifeless, monotone, boring. You leaf through the pages, looking for the excitement you found yourself indulging in while you were reading it ages ago. But it’s gone. Spirit has long left. You throw the book away. The pages fall out. The last remains of what was once a portal to another world are now a useless leather piece. You pick up the mess and store it back onto the forgotten shelf… You failed.