Fates and Stars.

Occasionally, I read a book that drains me.
I can't quite describe the multiple levels it drains me on. Certainly emotional, but there's something else. A sense of awe at the words that have caused whatever my reaction is, and I need to shut myself off because they're too beautiful.
After all, you can only ever read a book for the first time once, so you might as well savour it madly.

I have just read a book, and I suppose I'm writing about it now because I've not read a book in quite some time that drained me. The Fault in Our Stars.
I started this book, and I finished it falsely to begin with. I flicked. I was stressed at the time when I received it, so I didn't want to read and fall into someone else's pain, be overwhelmed with sympathy only they deserved. Selfishly, I wanted to hold onto my own mind's worries, the ones that don't matter. The ones you know don't matter.

Today, I read it fully.
I cried.
I have cried during one other novel, and that was during a time when I cried over the Lion King and Fantastic Four.

I don't know how to describe fully what I'm feeling after reading it, but I feel less sure of things. Less sure of what matters.
I want to curl up in my bed and sleep for days, in the hopes that I'll understand whatever it is this book has caused me to feel.
I'm silently tossing up making deals with God to let me never go through what Hazel and Augustus and Isaac did, be it as a daughter or sister or girlfriend or wife or mother or grandmother or aunt or friend, and dismissing it as a futile activity.

And John Green has taken my breath away again with a book, and if I write like that one day - if I drain just one person the way his words have drained me - then my words will be a success.