sometimes a book is like an ordeal midway you have to get through you want to quit but you have to see how it ends and how you feel when you emerge like you're captive in someone else's quest for liberation and by  a reader's catharsis you are liberated by the last page like when you climb out of the water. that's what reading the waves is like. i'm almost finished. i pause with the feeling of almost finished, resting in the portal of a life, of a book, getting ready, waiting for myself. to be ready, to pause in a feeling.