The Story of the Vampire, L (Completed | Featured )

4. [Leis] 2003 - The End

You said that you could not find anyone to help. With dignity, with integrity, please allow me to do this. Without changing my words.

Without changing. 

What happened, it is important that others know. And now what is happening, that these days it is hard to trust anyone. Even those people who I thought of as friends, things seem so different between us. From moment to moment, everything is different.

Again I beg you, do not alter what I am saying now. I want to do what I can. I can only tell you what I know. Do not break my heart and change my meaning, when both of my hands are open.

You, Mini, did not go to California, like I did. Was it wise to stay away? Was it wise to leave? I know that you must have been there. It must have not been long that you were there. Is it that you felt it wiser to flee? Not even a day before I arrived, you left. I know it. When I arrived, when I entered the room that was supposed to be mine, I found, "Oh, not even a day that someone left his room like this." I have found out that it was yours, long after the fact. In fact, not long after I have sent you things personal to me, my voice, my secret pains, I found out that you had been sleeping there. I found out only this year. Your room. Your slept in sheets, that I washed, for there was no one to wash them. What I washed.

Laurent begged me, "Come where I can see you, from North Carolina, please come," and so I told Q, "Come." But he was still hoping Jackie would come home. The more years went by without Jackie, the more Quinn anticipated his return. He kept saying "What if he comes home now?" whenever I asked him. He was mad with hope. He tore at my clothes, he swore oaths against me, and so I went alone. I did not know if I would ever see him again, but what could I tell him? I told him everything about the sense of danger. It was not as important as staying there, for him. "What if I am killed?" he asked me. "What about it? Huh?" In anger. 

Whenever I am without him, really he is with me, in my mind, but even more, knowing that he might not be safe, I was not able to be myself. There was not any thinking straight, for me, existing in a cloud. On the plane, I tried to write to him, but I have never been good at writing. I could not find the right words and could not remember how to spell a lot of them properly, and so I thought that I would call him when I got to the house.

When I arrived at the airport, in my sunglasses, I looked for someone I might know, anyone, or at least a boy with a sign. No one. I was tired. To find myself alone in the airport left a faintly bitter taste with me, and I felt a little savaged. In the taxi, I made little angry conversations with myself. "Why did I come? Why did I come? Why beg me? Why listen? Why so much fighting? Why did I leave mon homme? Can it be so urgent then? Why do this to my man and myself, to make us feel badly?" An hour away, I picked up my cellphone, and heard D asking me, "Maintenant, ou est-tu?"  Right now, where are you? He told me to stop in front of a museum where he would come and take me to a hotel. I told him, "A hotel? Mais non? Why cannot I stay at home? And wait? Outside? Alone? At this hour?" I could not believe that he called me to say so, but by the time I arrived, the anger had left me. Why anger? And yet the bitter taste, spreading into my throat and into my heart. 

I found myself absorbed with myself, with being sad in a way that was self-satisfied. Perhaps I think so now, and really it was true sadness, and worry, but I did not see Laurent in the house right away. To think that I ever felt real despair. Did I?  

I sat down in the sitting room as it grew dark. 

For a long time, Laurent and I had been growing apart. Things between us felt distant. In the house, there seemed a lot of tension. In the room, I did not want to look up much, or explore. In the dense atmosphere, among so many who I did not know at all, I felt exposed and vulnerable. That feeling of nakedness I had been feeling so often, whenever I was with Laurent in those last years. How he looked, how he would not look at me. I looked at myself and I felt ashamed.