Biblionaut Versus "The Book"

If you don't play by "the" book, they'll beat you senseless with it. There was a time in my life when I was all over "the" book but I guess you could say I never read my own press, at least not if it was printed in "the" book. All I had to see was what life was like for those who weren't mentioned favorably or weren't in "the" book at all. I called these people friends. They were stuck in a black hole while I was a star soon to burn out. Yet my story remains in this book and stories require belief to sustain themselves as living things. So I ask where has all the belief that has sustained me through the years come from? A select few individuals have managed this and even fewer continue to believe. In the end, only my mother and father continue to testify to the superstar protagonist of an obscure story in a hypothetical tome.

As a self-professed biblionaut, I continue to venture into the ether on a daily basis and aspire to gather materials with which to build my own books. No longer am I holding out for elusive happiness or success. If I must ride my broken heart like a battleship to the day of my demise, so be it. Make no mistake, noise will be made and pages will be filled. Sooner or later, I will figure out how to sustain myself in this world but not without a fuss, never without a fuss.

The age in my eyes is really beginning to show through. Those who gaze upon my face may or may not sense that these eyes have seen much more than this world and have yet to actually read "the" book. I mean, I've skimmed it, read the Cliff Notes and seen the movie plenty of times. But really, who can read that thing? Maybe it is read to us in the womb. We are certainly aware of it as soon as the world it describes supplants the world we came from. For me, if I could actually look back to the world we came from, I imagine a great big pair of legs with green and white striped socks like Nanny from Muppet Babies. A part of me will always have my arms wrapped around one of them, refusing to be pulled into this replacement world.  The lines between life and survival will blur for as long as I draw breath. Somewhere there is a girl who just happens to need what I've got and when we collide, I will wrap my arms around her. I'm sorry, Nanny.