Falling in love with fictional characters

Everything I should have learned to avoid by now, and I fell tonight, hard. Only a movie... with a Bob Dylan soundtrack, though, chaining emotions from out of bounds.
Going home from the theater empty-handed, and no relief in the fact that it would only be another mistake if it were actually happening to me. Which is why I'm here, now, writing into an empty void about why my pulse is a little faster tonight.

I fall in love with real people, too, but only after they're gone, it seems. Memory is the finest thread for weaving your own perfect story. I do halfway try to stay in touch with the writers, at least, they're easier to glorify and make for keepsakes of letters.
I have a cedar chest full of them, pages and pages of beautiful words, typed, inked, the pencils fading. Some still folded into intricate little packages, and many in my own hand.

The best have been composed across great canyons of time and space, less diluted by the trivialities of real life. A thoughtful concentrate, wrapped in the lyrics of a bard. I may find myself a writer, in erratic spurts of inspiration that seem to fall right around the time I find myself in love again, with someone to write for, that is.

Life explodes in fantasy adventure for a few brief moments until I realize what's happening and leave, no forwarding address.
I have simply written a scene around me, leaving my favorite character behind, confused, to realize:
Every story comes to an end.
But, I have many memories yet to weave, many lives yet to lead.

This story's not over yet.

I fall in love with fictional characters too. I fall in love with people in books. Can I love in real life as much as I do within a text?
"Real life" doesn't happen in the same place as the written word does. Book time is distilled time, heavy time. Everything is significant, everything is symbol, every word is a prayer in this religion of language.
Written love encompasses eternity because it is frozen in time. A moment's thought becomes a longstanding condition, an unalterable state-of-being.

I am more dramatic in writing than I am in life.
My emotions can never hope to live up to the way I write them. (Is this true? Maybe. But it might be the opposite.) When you grow up with books equally as important as the real-time world, who can blame you for craving intensity? Or for being confused at the impossibility of flitting between one person's thoughts and another's, panicking at being constrained to one's own mind and experiences exclusively.

Letters. If I write enough I can make myself into a fictional character, I can write the book of me, I can live within the book and make it into an architectural space. Letters between two people build a space between them and the space is stretched taut between two points. Can you live in the space if you are, by definition, one of it's poles? Or is it just spun out of you, like silk from a worm, coalescing into some ephemeral cocoon?

I fall in love with love letters. I will become a nun, and devote myself to the church of love letters, I will marry (symbolically) the God of text, the deity of language, the empty set that can never be defined, the super-word, the meta-cipher.

I will lose myself in the text and allow myself to be deciphered, for the text and I are fully devoted to each other, insofar as we depend on each other to read and to be read. Nothing can be held back because the text displays itself to me in all of its nakedness, everything that it is is there for me to see, and it enters into me to remain forever engraved upon my memory.

Real love is being able to accept the faults that someone has instead of hiding them or denying their existence. Perfection in a lover's eyes isn't really perfection, but acceptance of the bad and an embrace of the good.

That kid you met back in high school, that you were convinced you were in love with from conversations across the dining hall and afternoons out for pizza wasn't real. The person you really were in love with was in your head. A perfect being created from the parts of them you embraced. In the end you really just fell for a fictional character of your own mind's design.

When you learn to make flaws beautiful, then your real life loves won't be fictional characters.