Lost In Forks

Obsessive: Excessive in degree or nature. That's what I was. I knew it. My friends knew it. My family knew it. Even my teachers knew it. I would have been embarrassed if I could have cared about anything but the world I'd discovered quite by accident.

I wasn't even into the whole vampire thing but there I was almost every night re-reading my favourite story, about Edward and Bella, about love against the odds and about fighting for that love.

I suppose you could say I'm a romantic, I believe there are soul mates out there for everyone and devouring Stephenie Meyer's work made me believe even more.

So I guess it wasn't a surprise that late one afternoon as I was walking home from school, I had just began Twilight again for possibly the two hundredth time. I no longer needed to study the words; they flowed straight out of my head and off the page, comforting my ears with Bella woes about moving to a completely new location, even if she had been there many times before.

My world was a lot less interesting than Forks. I lived in a two bedroom semidetached on the outskirts of Peterborough, a cathedral city in the East of England with a population of around 162,000. Nothing like the small 3,120 something population of Forks. I wished more than anything to live in a place with less people. Not that I was like Bella in that I was cripplingly shy but more because in a city of 162,000 plus it was hard to be noticed by anyone, let alone a soul mate. Even in a large city surrounded by people I felt totally alone.

In that respect it was easy to see why certain books had become my saviour. Alone and friendless I escaped to the world where I felt as if I already had friends. Alice, Angela, Emmett even Mike with his puppy dog crush on Bella seemed like people I could share stories and secrets with. It was sad yes but then again so was my life. Books were my only sanctuary from my loneliness.

So once again I reached into my backpack and pulled out my well thumbed copy of Twilight, pausing for a moment on the cover to run my finger tips over the picture there, snow white hands cradling a bright red apple, the strong protecting the delicate, before I flicked it open and clutching the bottom of the book against my chest wrapped my fingers over the top edge to keep the pages from fluttering in the January bitter cold wind. I should have been wearing gloves but it was harder to turn pages in thick mittens. With a jolt in my stomach I realised it was exactly four years to the day that Bella moved to Forks permanently. Smiling at the little resemblance of Twilight in the real world I started walking along the edge of roadside not even noticing the traffic or the school bus passing me carrying a lot of students in my class. I was known as the weird girl anyway, always with her nose in a book, usually the same book or at least the same series of books.

It was hard to explain to anyone else who didn't understand the series. That they were more than books to me. They helped me cope with my own life.

Since mostly all I ever thought about was Twilight, reading it, surfing the net about it, reading fan fiction, looking at manips people had created and even more recently watching music videos people had made from the film, it was surprising there was any room for anything else inside my head, it was predominantly filled with Twilight.

So maybe it wasn't surprising what happened. Surely there's a point when you begin to confuse real life and fantasy. I knew Edward, Bella, Alice, Rosalie etc weren't real. They were fictional. Created from the mind of the author Stephenie Meyer and yet they felt real, as if somewhere in the world they had given her permission to write about their secret world and a love story that could touch all.

All I know is that I didn't hear the car swerving and honking as the driver skidded on a patch of black ice and careered into the side of the road but I did feel it, the pain in my side as it hit me throwing my body up into the air. And I know too that as I came down and hit the grass that under my feet had felt so soft, my hands never relaxed their firm grip on my book.

Little did I know then that this decision not to let go would follow me into the darkness that, as I lay there by the roadside that morning and people around me cried out and screamed, seemed to swallow me up and spit me out someplace I could never have even imagined.