An Ending: The Wheel of Time

This post contains spoilers for A Memory of Light.

Read it at your own peril.

I am writing this on Saturday, January 12, 2013, though it won't post until Monday. I got up this morning at 8 am, promptly opened A Memory of Light for the first time, and continued reading it until 9:45 pm. I think it's safe to assume that between meals, bathroom breaks, and dealing with my dogs, I actually read it in under thirteen hours. I think that's a new record for me. 908 pages of small font in thirteen hours. But man, I couldn't have stopped if I wanted to.

It's finally over.

I didn't actually cry at any point, mainly because when I'm reading I'm so engrossed in a story that I rarely feel anything. It's not like watching a movie. It's more immediate than that. I'm just so in it that there really isn't a me sitting separate from it to cry. Which is weird and hard to explain. But my eyes did burn at several point, and when I got to the end, when I read those last words, I almost did cry.

I closed the book and sat there for a moment, leaning over it. I just...the ending...I...

No words.

It's hard to sum up how I feel as a whole, other than every time I read those last words of the book, I want to cry, though I can't explain why.

Maybe it's because for so long we've talked about how there are no beginnings, but it was a beginning. And finally, it was an ending.

I really can't express all the different things I'm feeling in one post because there are so many! So what I'm going to do instead is write a post about how I feel about each of the major character story lines and then probably a post about a whole much of miscellaneous characters.

I'll post one a day for the next two weeks, because I don't want to spend the next month drawing this out for people who don't care about the Wheel of Time. I think I can get it all done in that time. Right now I'm thinking the following schedule.

Tuesday (1/15): Rand
Wednesday (1/16): Mat
Thursday (1/17): Perrin
Friday (1/18): Egwene
Monday (1/21): Demandred
Tuesday (1/22): Tuon
Wednesday (1/23): Aviendha, Elayne, & Min
Thursday (1/24): Androl & Pevara
Friday (1/25): Miscellaneous
  
But now I also intend to re-read the whole series. Why? Various reasons, but mainly because I like to read a whole series with knowledge of the ending as I start from the beginning. 

And maybe just maybe I'll do it because I want to believe: "There are no endings, and never will be endings, to the turning of the Wheel of Time."