And It Seems Like Things Will Never Change

Have you ever been lonely? I mean, really. Not that bullshit teen lonely. I mean, have you ever felt completely and utterly alone, no matter how many people are around you? I did. You’re probably thinking, whats makes me so different from you? How come my loneliness is so special? My guess is that you haven’t ‘lived’ as long as I have. 204 years this October. And no, I’m not undead. Well, technically. Differently biotic. To put it plainly, I’m a vampire. One of the last to be precise. That’s not why I feel alone though.

Every single day of my life I feel this lonely, the empty, feeling. Every few years a meet someone who I think can fill that empty, to make me not feel so lonely. And for a while, they do. But then they start to age. If they don’t know about me, I leave around then. If they do know about me, then all I can do is watch them die.

The first one was Jessica. 1806. Only a year after I was turned, reborn. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I was 19 at the time, technically still 18 but I’ll stick with 19 for simplicity. She was tending to her garden when I passed by her house, on the way to my own. She looked up at me and smiled. The way the sun hit her face made her glow. I stopped infront of her fence and smiled back. She stood up and wiped the dirt off of her knees. She was just as tall as I was. She wiped her hands on a rag and stuck out her arm, extending her hand for me to shake.

“You’re new to Morganville, aren’t you? I’m Jessica. Jessica Dowell.”

I grabbed her hand. Her skin was soft, even though the palms of her hands were calloused from working in the garden.

“Yes I am. My name is Frank. Frank Iero”

We filled almost an hour with small talk and I eventually asked her out to dinner. She said yes. Two months later we were married. I still hadn’t told her who I was. What I was. The following month I found out she was pregnant. I knew then I had to tell her. I did so and the next morning I found her hanging from a rope in the kitchen and a letter on the table.

Dear Frank,

If you are reading this then you have found me. I am sorry, but I find it impossible to raise my child in that house with the state that you are in.

That’s probably what hurt me the most. Her child.

Do not worry, I haven’t told anyone of your…problem. Please don’t blame yourself Frank, this is for the best. I really did love you, but it is not safe for me to be with you and honestly, I am not sure if I could have tolerate having to raise this monster, this hybrid, that would have been our child.

Sincerely,

Jessica.

P.S. If it was a girl, I was going to name her Cynthia. If it was a boy, I was going to name it Frank.

It took me over 100 years to recover from Jessica. By then I had moved many times, I had to. I couldn’t risk people noticing that I wasn’t aging.

William was the next. When you are immortal, you seem to loose preference in which sex you find attractive. The year was 1913 and I had just moved to Anchorage. He was an artist, something not very respected, but I adored his work. I had attended an event, a gallery of sorts, he was holding at his mansion (apparently, he was living mainly off of his inheritance). I looked through his abundant artwork, there had to have been over 50 paintings, but I’ll admit, I was a bit bored. He must have noticed this for he rushed over to me with wine. Apparently, that was the best tactic for hushing critics. I addressed him about his work, about why it was so tame when he seemed to be the complete opposite. He gave me a sly smile.

“It’s whats popular. It sells. I may be an artist, but I can’t live off of Mommy and Daddy’s dead money forever. You want to see something more…exciting?”

I nodded and he bade me to follow him. I did so and soon we ended up in what I could only guess was his studio. He walked over to a desk and opened the left draw. He took out a rather large book, bursting at the binding with parchment. He walked back over to me and sat down in the leather chairs next to the bookcase. I followed suit. He passed me his book and told me to open it. I did and was immediately enthralled with what I saw. Gore, and lots of it. The first page alone was what looked to be a murder scene. I flipped through the book, half disturbed and half enlightened. They were beautifully horrific. I asked him what his statement was, the reason behind his art. He grinned and took a sip of his wine.

“Well” he said, setting his glass on the table, “some of them mean nothing, like the paintings you saw in the ballroom. But those…those little drawing, mean more to me then anything. The so-called statement that they make, or would make if I ever showed them, is exposing the violent, dirty, hellish world we live in. And that we think that it’s okay! We-we think that, that, it is totally acceptable to kill another human being. And not just criminals, the government tortures and kills people for information. It’s disgusting.”

I thought a moment before leaning forward and pecking William’s lips. He didn’t seem surprised.

“Sorry” I said, “It’s all the wine.”

He looked at my barely touched glass.

“Right. Of course.”

After a while, I came to love him more then Jessica. He didn’t make me forget entirely about her, but the memory of her, seeing her…hanging there… grew fainter and fainter everyday I was with William. I told him what I was after we had been together 10 years. I was 137, technically still 18, he was 31. He actually accepted the fact that I was a bloodsucker, well, as long as I never killed my victims, which were usually animals anyway, which was fine with me. I had killed before but I didn’t like to. It all brought back thoughts of Jessica and our child. But William was different. The only downside was that I had to stay in the mansion most of the time, so I wouldn’t be noticed. Oh, that, and William’s mortality was also a downside. After another 10 years I realized that it was actually more painful to watch William slowly dying than see Jessica already dead.

He died in 1947. In his sleep. Next to me, in our bed. While I knew that I loved him more than I had Jessica, he was easier to get over. It still took me over a decade, but because he died naturally it wasn’t as painful.

I moved to London in 1963 and met Claire the same year. She wore headbands and Go-Go boots with her massive amounts of eyeliner. We didn’t last very long, only one year. Hey, if you’re like me, years seem like seconds. She was a fun girl, a bit of a drunk, but nice enough. I thought so, anyway. When I told her that I was a vampire, though, she left me. I moved to Finland soon after.

After a while I started to miss her. We weren’t very serious, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t feel for her. After some research I found out that she had been placed in psychiatric care for believing in vampires. Go figure.

I moved back to New Jersey in 2000 and haven’t left since. The boy I’m with now, Mikey, is 20. I’m still 19, and 203, soon to be 204. We’ve been together for 3 years now. He’s known for 2 of them, but I’m sure he’s had his suspicions from the beginning. He hasn’t run and he hasn’t killed himself. But I’m not sure what will happen now. I know I love him, and I don’t want to watch him die, but I’m not sure if I’m ready to…change someone, or if he’d even want to be like me. I’ve never tried turning anyone, and there’s so much that could go wrong. But I know, deep in that shriveled up organ called my heart, that Mikey is the one. Not the high schools “Jimmy’s definitely the one. I’m totally sure Tommy is the one. Oh my god, I think Aaron is the one”, one. I’ve had many loves but never a soul mate, and I feel that Mikey is that soul mate.

He's taller than me, like William was, but much skinnier, lanky if you will. He has mousy brown hair and thick-rimmed glasses. He is, to put it plainly, awkward and geeky. But he is beautiful.

I met him after I had lived in Jersey for a year. Another art gallery, surprise, surprise, I'm an artsy type, but it wasn't his, his brother, Gerard, was the artists. This time, the gore wasn't hidden at all. They were all amazing, mind blowing, thought-provoking paintings, even if they weren't exactly PG. Or even PG-13. Hey, some of them even went over R. As I scanned the crowd I could tell almost half of them were horrified and the others were pretending to "think about the message of their painting" while secretly not knowing how to interpret it. That’s when my eyes landed on him. He was standing next to his brother, also very beautiful, but not as much so as Mikey in my eyes, and he was talking very animatedly. Before I knew it I was infront of him, just standing there, and he was staring at me, his brother gone to entertain some of his guests that weren't disgusted by his work. I got my wits about me just before he started to walk away.

"I'm Frank." I said, extending a hand.

"Mikey" he said simply.

There was another silence but this time neither of us made a move to leave. I scratched the back of my head awkwardly. He giggled at me and stepped closer.

"You're a weird one, aren't you?"

I smiled at him.

"No, not usually. I just...you stunned me with your looks. I can't think properly."

He rolled his eyes, at that moment I actually thought that I had offended him and that he was straight. But he proved me wrong by taking my hand and grabbing a sharpie from his back pocket. He scribbled down his number then capped the marker.

"There." He said, putting the sharpie back in his pocket.

"If I really 'stunned' you" He smiled.

"Then maybe you'd wanna call that number sometime and ask me on a date. Just maybe, if I really, metaphorically, stunned you."

He left after that and I just stood there, grinning.

I asked him out the next day, Saturday night. He agreed, which would have been embarrassing if he didn't, and I picked him up at 7:00. We went to dinner, and Italian place, I found out that he was Italian as well, something we have in common. I found many more things that we had in common as the dinner progressed. Music tastes, literature, art, films, almost everything. After dinner, which I insisted on paying for, we took a walk down the shore and bought ice cream, which Mikey insisted on paying for. We got back to his apartment at 11:30. He invited me in for coffee and I agreed, and before you jump to conclusions it was just coffee. We didn't do anything...like that...until we had been officially dating for months. I love him more and more each day.

And as he lies here, his head on my chest, mindlessly flipping through channels on the TV, stopping for a few seconds on each channel before leaving, that he, Michael James Way, is the one.

“Hey.” I say, nudging him softly.

He looks up at me and pushes his glasses up.

“Yeah…” he mumbles against my chest.

I place my hands on his hips.

"I love you."

He smiles back at me.

"I love you, too Frankie."

Before he turns back to his channel surfing I place a tender kiss on his forehead.

“What would you think…” I pause, choosing my following words carefully, “about me…turning you?”

He raises an eyebrow.

“Turning…me. Like…?”

I bite my lip, showing him and fang and he immediately understands. He gasps and sits up, straddling my waist and looking down at me with fascination.

“Turning me into, like, a vampire?”

I nod and turn away, tears already forming at the corners of my eyes. I feel a hand under my chin and I look up at him, only to see him lean in and kiss me passionately. When he pulls away and lays his head back down on my chest and goes back to changing the channels. He finally finds a show he likes and sets the remote down, interlacing out hands. I cock my head to the side.

“So…?”

He looks up and me again and sighs.

“Yes, duh. I love you, Frank. So much. I want to be with you forever. Eternity. So...now can I watch my show?”

I fake a pout and he smiles up at me and kisses me again, before going back to his program. And I know right no this boy, his smile, has filled that empty space inside of me. And I know that I’m never going to be lonely again. He’s the only one that makes me feel alive. And he does that by being willing to die to be with me. For eternity.