Tamberlin's Account Read Free

maybe see if they have it. Robert O’ Brian.
    I don’t know that a library could ever feel thoroughly “cleared”. Be careful.
    I don’t know how it is for other people, but even with so few things to enjoy, with the way things are, I feel like someone’s slapping my hand and saying, “You’re never going to eat one of those again.”
    They’re never going to write a song again. You’re never going to read a book by him again. Those people you loved—Hell, they’re never going to see a sunrise. ANY sunrise, ANYTHING again. I feel forbidden to enjoy anything too much. Sometimes at all. Regret and sympathy are probably the culprits—but I want to care that they’re gone. Someone needs to care that they didn’t make it, because they deserve to be missed. So sometimes I feel unworthy of being able to still have those things.
    I feel a lot of guilt.
    So, when I want to feel better and I think – well that murdering bastard is gone or that worthless piece of shit is surely gone too—I always, always, always end up in the land of:
    Damn, I’m never going to hear a new song by this person. I’m never going to know if this person or that person is alive—I want them to be alive. Are they? Have they suffered? Are they dead? Some of the shows I watched religiously; books I always read—
    Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”
    Anyway…
    I’m one of those people who get desperately involved in the well-being of fictional characters. I’m no stranger to sobbing and my heart just hurting for people and creatures that never were.
    When I was pretty little I, like most children, read or was read, the Winnie-the-Pooh books. I remember being stricken with a sense of loss and sadness and really, really felt that my stuffed animals had feelings and perhaps even lives. The first book I remember just making me bawl was the same book where my love of the end of days was born—in third grade when I read The Stand . Broke my heart. The Road by Cormac McCarthy has become almost a bible to me. In fact, it’s the only book I’ve kept.
    It gives me a sense of not being alone in this. But even before the dead revolted, the book filled a void where faith in parents and family should have been. It made me wish I had a father like that. Anyone like that… Since all this started, that fictional father has been this real woman’s mentor.
    And now I have the time to read it as often as I please. There aren’t a lot of authors like him anymore. If there ever were.
    Video games and books particularly impact me because you spend more time with the people than in movies. Sometimes TV series have characters I’ve liked that much—but few . A lot of series, I think, ruin the characters when the stories last longer than their stories and the inspiration behind them, just because they are popular.
    For me, I know that’s not true for everybody.  
    Video games, most of the time, you’re getting someone’s story too, BUT you’re fighting with them, keeping them safe and “helping” the characters make their decisions.
    I know that won’t ring true for people who think video games are a waste of time or for people who just don’t get into it, but I’d love to know I’m not the only one that was horrified when Agro died in Shadow of the Colossus or that cried themselves sick through the last battle in God of War where Kratos had to desperately hold onto his family to win.
    Maybe I am the only one, now.
    Anyway, it’s those things I miss and, on top of the people I loved and knew, were a whole shitload of people I didn’t know—maybe even their names—whose work made my life better. I think about what’s become of them.
    That’s not even the weird stuff that I end up thinking about. I don’t think that’s weird at all. Its compassion, isn’t it?
    Maybe compassion is weird. It was before, why wouldn’t it be now?
    Oct 3 10:02am
    I don’t know what state you’re in—
    If you’re reading this sometime after this shit, maybe