Piece by piece, I lose myself, Only to find what wasn’t here before, And the deeper into it I walk, A tug at my heartstrings tells me I want more. All the lives I have lived, All the faces I have seen, All the roads I have walked In all the places I have been— How do I tell which one is mine? I’m a thousand stories in one.
The deeper I try to drown, The stronger it takes a hold of me; Words swimming in my head And the ghosts of all the lives I’ve led Whisper into my ears, hoarse and eerie, Saying, ‘You can’t outrun us.’ Not that I ever wanted to. All I searched for was an escape, But I let myself be consumed, Like a moth infatuated by the flame, I let it take over me, I gave in.
So, now I don’t know myself; Who’s to tell me who I am, For not even I have found her yet— I keep searching, one story after another, Reading between the lines, Flipping through the pages, Looking for myself in the ink, As though somewhere lost in those tales Is who I am meant to be right now.
What if I’ve already found her? The one who stares back at me in the mirror. Perhaps who I am right now: Chaos brimming, Stories swimming, Uncertain, lost, confused, Stumbling around a little, But wide, wide awake— I keep losing parts of me as I go, The more stories that I read, I find myself craving more, As though walking deeper into the woods, One book from my shelf at a time, A bit of me lost to their stories And a bit of them lost to mine.
Today, once again, I chose to deviate from the original prompt given by napowrimo.net to write about how it feels to get attached to stories and characters when you read a very good story. Recently, I feel like I have lost a huge part of myself to a couple of very beautiful stories, but in a way, I am also glad that it happened because I ended up with a whole new story to cherish forever instead.
The Shubhster Diaries 
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