What it's like to read a really good book: I warned you that something like this might happen

I don't think masochism is the right word for it. It's not pain, really. It's a sort of ache that I've always found hard to describe. A dull thud, the sort of thing that comes from the weight of several realizations washing over you at once. It's like death, and drowning, and coughing and sputtering for air and when you finally come up for breath, the world is gone. Like you're standing on a mountain, watching the old gods die.

And then, when you finally recognize it, like some familiar face in a memory that you thought you'd lost or maybe never even had, it makes you cry, it makes your face hot and your breath ragged and when you finally look up and realize that nothing and everything has changed, you're overcome by the urge to do it again, to seek out the rough, blunted razor and cut yourself dumbly on it because you know that the sensation of getting torn open again will really just get you closer to feeling something, something that feels so good while it sucks and squeezes the air out of your lungs and leaves you half-drowned and gasping for life.

And once you step back to think, you're only dragged off further; into the death of the text, into its own rebirth as you begin to own it, and into the ways it starts to build itself into you; until it becomes something completely new - a post-text, a fictional memory, a bricolage of random, disconnected laughter and wailing and dissociated faces and symbols and words and feelings, until you think about it and all you can sense is the shadow of an emotion, a hollowness and a distant prick that you know that you really did feel, and how good it felt, and how terrible.