Carrie Flynn lives for her books. She reads them all day and pores over them all night and dreams about them when she sleeps. She reads so much it sometimes gets to the point where she forgets what her name is, or where she lives. She begins to call herself by the names of people she’s read, and her own life is so uneventful it seems the things she’s read must have been real.
Carrie Flynn prefers reading books over real life. In books she can be whoever she wants to be: a sexy detective, a rampaging murderer, an award-winning novelist, or even some fantastical creature. In real life, all she can be is Carrie Flynn, the girl who reads too much. Having as many lives as books she can get ahold of is so much easier.
Carrie Flynn had never met someone who read as much as she did. She had never met anyone who woke up and forgot their name so wholly that they adopted a new alias for the day. She had never met anyone who gave up the outside world for the printed one with such complete devotion as she had. In that respect, the books belonged to her. They were her world because she read them, and because she read them, she was theirs.
Carrie Flynn one day met a man who introduced himself by the name of a book she had just finished. He wore the same awkward, unfamiliar smile she had seen so many times on her own face. It was the smile of a person who had just slipped on a new shirt, or a stiff pair of shoes, or a borrowed identity. She introduced herself as Mrs. Stolen-name, and he smiled the smile of a man gazing upon his lover.
Carrie Flynn exchanged pleasant printed-banter with this man, and they shared a lovely evening going to printed places and eating stolen-food, and in the morning, they had both put on names from new books. Different books.
Carrie Flynn never loved a man so wholly and completely again. She never met another man who saw that the name she gave him was false.
Carrie Flynn grew old and weary, and her eyesight began to fail her. The less books she was able to read, the less she knew who she was. She had never been Carrie Flynn beyond an avid reader of books. Her memory began failing her, and she could no longer remember that she had ever been Carrie Flynn, little-used identity as it was. She began forgetting her books, and forgetting her life’s work.
Carrie Flynn’s eyesight failed her, and she could no longer read books. Without books or memory of them, she had no one to be. She was only herself, a person she had long since forgotten.
Carrie Flynn lived out the rest of her days not reading, which is what Carrie Flynn had always done, and not remembering that she was Carrie Flynn, which is what Carrie Flynn had always been.