A Beating Heart

Meet Colby

Happiness is defined as a mental or emotional state of well-being in which positive or pleasant emotions range from contentment to intense joy.

By this definition: I haven't been happy for a very long time-667 years to be exact.

You're probably wondering how that's even possible huh? Yeah well, me too.

In 1348 at the age of seventeen, I was dying... practically dead in fact. And I'd had come to terms with my fate-the fate that many of my friends had already suffered. All of my family had contracted the bubonic plague and there was no cure. No hope. No future.

No hope for anyone except for us-my family. We all had it, we were all on our death beds and by some miracle, act of God or sheer luck-whichever you prefer, we survived.

The facts are: one third of the population died, none one survived after contracting it, and it was an unrelenting disease.

We knew that... we feared it... we contracted it... we survived.

In the days after, we realized that we were different. Our bodies grew stronger, faster. We were evolving... nothing could hurt us. And our bodies craved something that it'd never once desired.

Human blood.

I remember my first time tasting human blood like it was yesterday; although it was centuries ago. It scared me how bad I wanted it, craved it-needed it. It scared all of us. It took years for us to learn how to control our hunger, to gradually find a balance between regular food and what our bodies craved most and as the years passed we realized that none of us were aging, none of us could die either. My dad and my brother have fought in many wars over the centuries, returning home from each of them without as much as a scratch.

That's how they figured out how truly immortal we were and as the years passed, we began to see how much of a curse our immortality was.

We moved all over Europe, never staying in one place for too long in fear that someone would recognize us, that we'd be found out. So we migrate from place to place, never calling one city home for more than five years.

It's exhausting and I've wanted out for as long as I can remember.

Living forever for some people, has its appeal, but I died at seventeen and therefore I would forever be stuck inside the body of a seventeen year old. Forget the fact that I'm over six hundred years old; I'd only ever be seen as a kid forever and that's depressing. And in my depressed and tired state, I drove a stake through my heart; obviously it didn't work since I'm here talking to you. No one knows that I tried to kill myself; I didn't want my parents to worry about my state of mind.

My brother and sister have adapted fairly well to all this though. They love it; being immortal, getting whatever they want when they want it; ever having to worry about dying or disease or anything really.

I just want to be normal, to live a normal happy life... fall in love, get married, have kids. I want those things but I know I'll never have them because of who we are-who I am and it's painful. Funny enough, it's practically the only pain I can still feel.