A Weary Vampire

Chapter 18

Being young forever. That's a great dream, right? Until you get to live it. Then, it's a nightmare.

Humans are literally suspicious of anything and everything, and someone looking like me...not ageing? Well. It certainly started raising some eyes in my neighbourhood. Of course, it wasn't a problem that I faced initially, but somewhere around three to five years later...yea. First, they got jealous. Of course, having child-like features is the epitome of not losing to your youthful years' stresses. But then, I started getting looks, almost whenever I stepped out. It was frustrating.

Makeup was a good friend during these times, and I accepted it gladly. I wanted to look older, more of my age. And it worked for a while, but then it started to pile more stress on my pile. I always had the option to move into a vampire community housing, still had it at this point. But I couldn't just leave my parents alone in their lonely years, after all, they gave me their everything. They didn't even force me into marriage, even though that did substantial damage to their respect in the society. They wanted me to choose my own love, in my own time, on my own terms.

But companionship scared me.

I already knew I would have to let go of my parents soon enough, what if I actually fell in love and that person would have to go away too one day? I was scared of losing people. And I didn't do a survey or anything, but I'm pretty sure that would be a common fear among us vampires.

Loss is a tough emotion to deal with, and it makes you tougher when you go through it.

And I've learnt it over and over all these years, it still shocks me to my core, the amount of sadness and imbalance the loss of a single important person causes in your life. That's why I don't look for long term companionship in humans anymore. It always hurts you, if the person themselves doesn't.

Eventually, my parents did leave me to fend for myself out of old age. And it caused me and my mental health a substantial amount of damage. Even when I knew it would come one day, it broke me twice. It was quite hard to bounce back from it, so I decided to finally accept the community living option, selling all of my parents' house and land because it would have been just a painful thorny memory forever, and anyway just very inconvenient to maintain.

Needless to say, I've always been an overthinker, and I don't think it has changed even now.

Community living was fun initially, and a lot more, and refreshingly so, accepting and welcoming than any other human society I had ever been to. All the people there were like me, and those common points made some great friends out of the bunch. It was here that for the first time I met Ivory, Nisha and Ciro. Those were the first good friends I made in my vampire life. And oh, Ciro is the guy I told you about before, I think? The hot rich businessman guy?

Anyway, we fell apart around the same time he became so successful, around 250 years back. I don't know how. I should try to get back in touch with him, right?

Afterall, these three were the ones who actually made me the vampire I am today, without them, I would have been just one little depressed bean.

Ivory, Nisha and I still meet up in the common rooms almost every week. We talk about life and play card games. It's so fun! Even though our physical conditions might never show it, we're old ladies now. Nisha is actually really older than all of us, and I just don't want to go through another loss, so I try not to think about it often.

But you know, it was the library of this very building that made me fall in love with reading, and books once more. You see, my relationship with books detiorated after I left school itself. Neither did I have the time to properly indulge in a book, nor did my roles as the only child around the house make it easier. And just like that, we fell out. But at the hostel, I had a lot of free time on my hands, to do things, to discover and care for myself, to make a better me out of myself. And just like that, on one of my walks around the place one day brought me to the library's building.

An old, old library. So old and neglected that vines covered its walls and even tried to break in through its stained glass windows.

It was something right out of an aesthetics pinterest board, and it was downright stunning.