Stories of every possible kind are exhausted in the unwritten. The characters, the plots, the settings are all stuck inside and swimming around the infinite pool of consciousness. When you read the beginning of a book, a multitude of stories start to complete the one that you’ve just begun.
For example, a book that begins with “The most terrible thing happened to my aunt the other day, and to fully understand it, I believe I must tell it to you”, evokes a story of a murderous plot, or a misattributed crime, or a humorous tale of petty mistakes, and that story may end with a happily-ever-after or a sudden stop or tantalizing cliffhanger or any number of conclusions. And then, diving deeper into the distraction, alternate beginnings start to pop up, which in turn have their assortment of endings, and those beginnings and endings call forth other beginnings and endings until your mind has spun so far from the origin that you wake with a start and realize that 15 minutes have passed without your reading a word.
It is often difficult to escape this pattern until you are already far into the story, or so gripped by the words that have been set that the potential directions they could take fade away. At this point, a mass genocide of possible paragraphs and chapters has been committed by you and the author, each sentence traversed contributing infinitely to the death toll, and when you arrive at the end, there is none left standing but one, the one that you just finished and can never alter, at the risk of forming an entirely different story and its own set of infinite possibilities and infinite massacres.
With the weight of this danger looming over you, it may seem irresponsible to even begin reading. You may be paralyzed underneath the gaze of millions of prepositional phrases and character-defining adjectives, all cast aside in the search for the right word. Even now, you must consider whether it was worth it or not to read this page.
