Attached to Fictional Characters Musing

I wonder sometimes if I'm too attached to people who don't really exist. I'm not (necessarily) talking about the voices in my head or my imaginary and "window" friends ... I'm talking more of the characters from books and movies whose lives seem so much more interesting than mine -- but also so much more brief and very unfinished.

Do you ever wonder what happens to a character after the credits begin to roll or after you've turned the last page in a book? I do. I think it's part of the reason I like epilogues so much. A week, a year, ten years later ... I want an update. I want to know what's happened to these people. I've just invested, at the very least, several hours of my life in learning their story ... someone tell me, please, whether things are still working out!

I wonder, for instance, in "Pride and Prejudice," if Mary and Kitty become good friends after the influence of Lydia is removed ... if Mary becomes a bit more outgoing and if, in exchange, Kitty gains a bit of reserve and self-control. Mary needs a friend, and what better place to look than among your sisters, especially when you have four of them?

I liked at the end of "A Long Way from Chicago," about ten years after the stories of visiting Grandma Dowdel have ended, when Joey is on the troop transport train and in the bleak pre-dawn hours, as his train passes through his grandma's town, he sees every light on in her house, and Grandma herself standing on the porch, waving big at the train as it passes by. That part of the book still makes me cry (it's written for adolescents ... and I'm in my late 20s)

I was addicted to the "Babysitters' Club" books in elementary school and part of junior high because I always wanted an update on what the Babysitters were doing. They were perpetually 11 and 13 years old, and I wondered what these cool teens were up to lately. I didn't want to be left out ...

I like the end of "Love Actually," when you see (sort of) how everyone in the story is connected, who hooked up with who ... it doesn't just leave you hanging at Christmas with an assumption that they all lived happily ever after.

I suppose I am a bit attached to non-existent people. Their lives (what I know of them) seem so much more colorful and entertaining than my own ... and years or decades or centuries later, I still want to know how their story turns out.