When Fiction seems to be reality...

The Swan Thieves....
I returned to that book and now I wonder why I'd ever stopped reading it...why did I put it down for a mystery or a thriller.
It's a book about obsession and love and painting and...
And have you ever been reading a book and suddenly think "that's me - that's what I feel..."? I'm finding this in the Beatrice and the Mary characters in this book (not, however, in the Kate character - the wife of the haunted painter, Robert Oliver). My emotions are wrapped up in theirs or theirs are wrapped up in mine.
I had a difficult time putting the book down last night to go to bed. I was up at 4 AM this morning, took a quick shower, got my coffee and began again.
Obsession. Is there anything that I would do above all other things?
Read and write. But the fire in the belly can be doused by rejection.
Would I feel the same way if I were a painter? If my work could be viewed almost instantly - not requiring time to read through a manuscript? At least the entire "product" would be there, out in the open, not sitting in the confines of two hundred plus pages.
I want to work at my obsession - like Mary, like Beatrice, like Robert and Olivier. I want to work at it to the detriment of everything else - to have the cats crying at me that I've forgotten the evening treat, that I can't find toilet paper or even tissues, that my hair is unkempt and I've ignored eating while I put just the right words together.
And I want to love...oh, to love...someone who understands that obsession. Happily, I believe, I've found that person to love.
I'll finish reading this book today but I will not be finished with it.
The fate of the world does not rest on the shoulders of these characters - possibly not even their own fates for that may have been taken out of their hands more than a hundred years before. But the telling of their stories, their loves, their obsessions...it all makes me want to keep on reading...
And it makes me want to paint.