Easily, one of my favorite sensations is finishing a book and instantly feeling that it is going to be stuck with me forever. For example, in the past six months, I have talked about the book Me Before You often and whenever I did, I always brought up the feeling of being changed by the book. Everyone kind of understood what I was talking about, but in their own individual way. For me, I read the book right before my high school graduation and did an incredible amount of core-shaking self reflection at 2 am one night, wondering if I had truly lived in the past eighteen years. For pretty much everyone else, it was just a really good book.

It’s the same feeling as watching a movie and finding yourself talking about it for the next week or two; it’s like hearing a song once and then putting it on repeat because something about it is just so good; it’s essentially binge watching a seven season Netflix show in three months. The best way to describe the feeling is hypnotic. You feel entranced by the story or the lyrics or the actors long after you part ways with the medium.

The thing that sets “that book” apart from your new favorite song or movie is how you absorb it: when you read, the majority of the book is in your head. Sure, you can say that when you listen to "that song" looking out the window in a car, you have a music video version of your life set to it. That’s a valid claim, and I’m so glad I’m not the only one who does this. But with books, you are given a story and are left to make it into something visual on your own. In that sense, you are the one who creates a soundtrack for the book, the one who makes the movie adaptation, and maybe the one who envisions a few spin-off series on Netflix.

When you find the right book at the right time, the image you have created hits in such a way that it shifts something inside you, rather than simply leaving you with just a good read. Now, you can’t listen to Photograph by Ed Sheeran the same way, but you can have philosophical talks with your friends over how adding that one scene to the movie really would have redefined their relationship. You are inexplicably tied to things that would usually be considered so commonplace, like the view of your house from a particular chair, the unconscious association when you hear “me before you” in a line of a song, or where you were when you first remember hearing about the book.

And obviously, obviously, you remember exactly how you finished the book: 2 am, by desk lamp, and using your shirt for tears and snot because you ran out of tissues twenty pages ago. When you think back on how the book made you feel, it’s almost heavy and a little melancholic. You have to remind yourself that it really is just a book, even though it feels like so much more than that to you.