The Cemetery Diaries
Invictus
Why did you do it? Because you wanted to fall, to come to this layer in the pit of Dante’s recollection? Silly pet. You cringe as the needle goes in, puncturing your pale, starry skin in the way that only a seraph blade can. I thought I told you about the thirst, and the consequences that come from ignoring it. I pinch the exit wound, daubing the single bead of violet that emerges. Your blood is no longer the blood of the living, but it requires live haemoglobin to get oxygen around your body, so that you don’t decay. If you don’t feed, or if you feed incompletely, you need to inject yourself with these preservatives– embalming agents, elixirs and antifreeze. Call it an addiction, a habit based in need. You’ll learn to crave it in time, just as you’ll come to crave fresh throats and other things… The blood-red eyes of a healthy undead specimen, for one– or so I hope.
I tie off the bandage with my teeth, and savour the smell of you. I’m a lonely creature, really. Blood and drugs are all the company I ordinarily desire. Nobody shares my private moments, my private Hell. I get privately trashed, and listen to the voices in my head egging me on from private corners of my mind. All the best artists of history were wasted, and I’ve always considered myself an enormous waste. I’m a sinkhole for human energy and demonic power. I exhaust the potential of the young like oh so many vices, because part of me, even in this dead state, longs to live. Something about squandering the fragile heartbeats of mortals makes me thirstier for the fleeting rapture of breathing and wasting and rotting. Though there’s all the difference in the universe between minds, I long to live my personal world. I am death unshackled, and I’ll do anything for another drop of freedom.
It’s going to take me a while to get used to your being here, but the sun is setting and it’s time for us to emerge again into the never-ending tapestry of night. The sky holds a thousand ways of being in its upturned cup, flooding darkness over the land. There is hellfire in the valley, dense like a bleeding clot. The moon is a coin tossed up on high, a bright, unblinking eye. We smell warm, fresh earth. There’s been grave digging going on. You head up the hill, drawn to the moon like a moth to a beacon, your slender frame cutting a narrow silhouette from the lighter cloud cover. Your hair billows out, a sail on the sky’s tide. Your cargo pants rustle along with the tall grass.
The sun has set, and we are up. We are invictus risen, horrorstruck, staring through dimensions. I feel those Latin letters stamped across my back in permanent ink, a brand and a spur. Within hours, I’m at the other end of being trashed, not wasted or wasting, but simply waste. I turn from consumer to consumed, like something combustible. It’s worse than coming down. I crash, like a skeleton crumbling under the weight of its own paper bones. I turn halfway to dust as the world rejects me and my masquerade of living. I’m in a weird place. Death takes you to strange corners of reality. Just ask me. You don’t, but you could have done. You always can, you know.
I pause on the hilltop to think, to assert a position inside the dizzying spiral of my descent. In a hundred years more I’ll be a different person in a different world. I’ll be the martyr for our way again, drained and lifeless. I’ll know all the horrors of recent years, the horrors of history, and of the past. Pray for my heart. Only intoxication masks the pain. Soon enough, you’ll see.
Drink, Trixie, and feel shadow course through your veins. It’s the way we were meant to be. And my cup runneth over.
I tie off the bandage with my teeth, and savour the smell of you. I’m a lonely creature, really. Blood and drugs are all the company I ordinarily desire. Nobody shares my private moments, my private Hell. I get privately trashed, and listen to the voices in my head egging me on from private corners of my mind. All the best artists of history were wasted, and I’ve always considered myself an enormous waste. I’m a sinkhole for human energy and demonic power. I exhaust the potential of the young like oh so many vices, because part of me, even in this dead state, longs to live. Something about squandering the fragile heartbeats of mortals makes me thirstier for the fleeting rapture of breathing and wasting and rotting. Though there’s all the difference in the universe between minds, I long to live my personal world. I am death unshackled, and I’ll do anything for another drop of freedom.
It’s going to take me a while to get used to your being here, but the sun is setting and it’s time for us to emerge again into the never-ending tapestry of night. The sky holds a thousand ways of being in its upturned cup, flooding darkness over the land. There is hellfire in the valley, dense like a bleeding clot. The moon is a coin tossed up on high, a bright, unblinking eye. We smell warm, fresh earth. There’s been grave digging going on. You head up the hill, drawn to the moon like a moth to a beacon, your slender frame cutting a narrow silhouette from the lighter cloud cover. Your hair billows out, a sail on the sky’s tide. Your cargo pants rustle along with the tall grass.
The sun has set, and we are up. We are invictus risen, horrorstruck, staring through dimensions. I feel those Latin letters stamped across my back in permanent ink, a brand and a spur. Within hours, I’m at the other end of being trashed, not wasted or wasting, but simply waste. I turn from consumer to consumed, like something combustible. It’s worse than coming down. I crash, like a skeleton crumbling under the weight of its own paper bones. I turn halfway to dust as the world rejects me and my masquerade of living. I’m in a weird place. Death takes you to strange corners of reality. Just ask me. You don’t, but you could have done. You always can, you know.
I pause on the hilltop to think, to assert a position inside the dizzying spiral of my descent. In a hundred years more I’ll be a different person in a different world. I’ll be the martyr for our way again, drained and lifeless. I’ll know all the horrors of recent years, the horrors of history, and of the past. Pray for my heart. Only intoxication masks the pain. Soon enough, you’ll see.
Drink, Trixie, and feel shadow course through your veins. It’s the way we were meant to be. And my cup runneth over.