Are we readers or are we writers?

I wrote this many years ago and think it deserves another airing: 

books, reading, writing

the words are on pages, visual, tactile.

descriptions, emotions, drama, happiness, passion.

sublime blissfulness plummeting into despair.

the wanting, the needing of a certain someone, without whom you will be forever empty.

actions taken, roads not travelled.

stories woven into tales of unexpected happenings.

each open to personal interpretation.

new beginnings, sad endings, happy endings.

confrontations, welcomed or not.

challenging adversities; drifting on seas of contentment.

gazing into the eyes of a newborn.

days, nights, or both, when that newborn will cry as if heartbroken and you won't know why, your own eyes will spill with tears, your own heart will break, until finally you both sleep, the deep sleep of exhaustion from which both of you will wake refreshed and ready to start again.

there are words of lives lived; real or imagined?

fiction based on truth? biography? fantasy?

we'll never really know, with the author perhaps unavailable to tell us one way or the other.

the lure of the words, the writing of the pages. falling into the story.

escaping, however briefly, from our own reality.

this is what makes an author, and this is why writing will never cease, as long as mankind has readers, because surely, eventually, a reader will write and the cycle will continue.

casual readers of fiction, others thirsty for knowledge, still others voraciously devouring book after book.

we think we are all readers. we don't "have a book in us", we don't have "a story that must be told", for we are 'only' readers.

yet here we are, on the internet, on blog pages.

writing.

for readers.