[ WP ] There 's a paperback on the clearance rack . On a whim your character picks it up and finds that it details their life thus far ... How does the book end ?

It was a cramped, dusty second-hand book shop; typewritten letters on a dog-eared, yellowed piece of paper were tacked to the door: *'' Closing down sale, it's goodbye from us. Sharing knowledge since 1921. `` * He entered the shop, pushing the flimsy green door open with ease. A bell rung high above. 
 
 The air was thick in the beams of sunlight that trickled through the crimson curtains hung on high windows - bars of light intersected, crossing the room with light. The bookshop had three aisles, each a few metres in length and a person's width, with shelves of books climbing towards the ornate ceiling, all of them with the same plumped-with-age, battered countenance. 
 
 He walked through the maze of old stories, tales and lives forgotten, feeling a definite sense of loss at the shop's closing; he'd miss its character, but like all good stories, he supposed, they had to come to an end. At random, he lifted a particularly crumpled volume from the highest shelf and turned to a page at the back. It was empty. He flicked forward and tried a page in the middle: 
 
 > Having been abandoned by his lover, Tristam spent some months in a tragic rumination; alienating his friends and letting the girl he had loved win. 
 
 He dropped the book as if it was suddenly red hot and smoking. This was *him*. He was Tristam, he'd been left on that rain-swept, exposed hill by Dani, had been told he was not good enough. Had been destroyed by his loss, had felt quite as exposed and eroded as the old hillside, as worn and forgotten. 
 
 Feeling the heat rising to his face in a perverse fright, he none-too-gently swept pages aside, finding the ending of the book. He found the last page and read, his eyes feasting on what he saw: 
 
 > It was on his birthday, April 4, that Tristam was taking a last walk through the sleepy Pembrokeshire town he had been born in. He had intended to end it that day, his friends forgotten and lover gone, Tristam had felt lonely and isolated on an increasingly bleak and ugly horizon. Out of curiosity - and more because the idea of loss was appealing to him at the time - Tristam had entered a book shop at random and found this very volume, and saw these very strokes being formed before his eyes. He had expected the novel to end in his hanging body, with an empty funeral as his last penstroke on this Earth. But the rest of this book is empty, and ready for writing - and so begun a new chapter in Tristam's life. 
 
 He stopped. And smiled. And turned around, and walked out of the door. The bell rung again as he closed the door. 
 
 _____ 
 
 -015
