with every second of attention afforded us, we vampires grow a second older. it is why we sleep in coffins, to protect us from peering eyes while we are vulnerable, and it is why we avoid the daylight hours, for that is when the humans are out shopping, buying groceries, picking up their children from school. the sunlight is not itself dangerous to us. in fact, for creatures as naturally cold as us, the warmth of the sun can be an exceptional pleasure. at least in small doses. but to be seen or not to be seen is a choice each vampire must make for themselves. some, for instance, find the draws of human life too fascinating to resist. they say it is worth a day or two of one’s otherwise long life to sit back and observe. humans, they say, endure their short lives of boundless suffering without fear. despite their being of the nature to die, they wander aimlessly through city streets, browsing local shops, skimming books, drinking espresso next to strangers. they get on and off city buses. they sit in parks for hours, lost to themselves. despite being gifted with immortality, vampires are covetous of time. yet those of the nature to die, throw it carelessly into the wind. many vampires cannot resist the sight. true, every parting glance, every fleeting observation from a stranger is perhaps a second or even a minute lost. but they are in good company. all around them, life drains away.

different vampires take this in different directions. there are the ekimmu, those commonly called the ‘lonely ones.’ they are the most covetous of their long lives and so live mostly off on their own. feeding is not actually a requirement for a vampire to live, only to keep a certain youthful, even human appearance. however, the lonely ones abjure all populated centers. they live in caves and pits, in the hollowed out trees of primeval forests or in the shallow swamps of the jungles. they eat perhaps once every hundred years, some backpacker or lost soldier caught wandering through their terrain. other times, it will be a diet of small mammals, birds and reptiles, though it is not recommended to drink animal blood. vampires in time become what they eat, so the lonely ones often, in time, morph and warp into beasts. there is a belief among many vampires that the lonely ones overwhelmingly comprise the older converts, those made vampiric late in their human lives. there is little statistical evidence that this is true, though it has cemented itself as a prejudice among many vampires. the older converts, they believe, are more immediately covetous of time. it is a habit carried over from human suffering. feeling themselves suddenly snatched up from death, they flee time itself, never to return. what is true, however, and without controversy, is that the detachment makes them mad. they become heartless, violent apex predators. they lose everything they know of their humanity.

at the other end of the spectrum are what vampires call the ‘bright young things,’ kamikazi pilots of the existential. they inject themselves into crowds, develop around them cults of personality, bring others into the folds of their love and great understanding. they are too radiant for other vampires to be around and attract all manner of attention. many vampires believe them immoral, that they reject the gift in favor of sentimentalism. it is said that there are two primary types of BYT: the first are the sages, the emissaries of love, who leverage powers of mesmerism and confidence to create social, political and religious movements: jesus of nazareth and siddhārtha gautama, for instance. but most go the way of the poet, which in today’s day and age is the influencer, the so-called youtube star, the tiktok magnate. the artists and the entrepreneurs. one must remember that attention paid even indirectly to a vampire can have an impact. that is why vampires don’t have reflections in mirrors or appear in photographs. even reproductions of our image are life-threatening. it is an old vampire’s tale that stoker based his dracula on a real-life vampire he’d met in a dublin bar, and it is said that by the time the play opened in the west end, the vampire was dead. we vampires must guard our likeness at all costs. but BYT give that no credence. they burn it, burn it all, in a blaze of glory and a repudiation of the dark.

and then there are those vampires in between the two extremes. most common by far are the lingerers. once turned, these vampires hang around the site of their former lives, skulking in the alleys outside their apartments or inviting themselves in for sunday dinner. they wish things to go on as they had before, and so struggle to pull themselves away from loved ones and the places they knew. so they inevitably stay too long at the fair, and then must forcibly withdraw all at once, stealing themselves away in the middle of the night without word or explanation. lingering is not healthy for the new vampire. it causes sentimentalism, nostalgia and a weak constitution. yet most of us understand the high cost of our unnaturally long lives, and if you do not wish to become an ekimmu, abject and alone, then each of us must ultimately decide the particular trade off. how much time would be enough? and how do you wish to fill it?

take my story, for instance. i left home right away after my conversion, leaving behind an adoring wife and our newborn daughter. i abandoned it all and toured the world. logistically, things were easier back then, shipping bodies of the undead to and fro. all you needed was a box and an undiscerning merchant vessel. these days, it’s harder to get a body past the tsa, and transatlantic flights can be...draining. back then, i could see much of the world by sea. and so i sailed to see the kabba of mecca and then the ruins of the acropolis. i swam the seas of french polynesia, and scaled the mountains of peal.

and when at last i had seen the world, i returned to the sleepy little town i had known once in a former life. i took a job as a home healthcare worker and came weekly to the tiny house my only daughter now lived, widowed, old and alone. i came to the house once a week and brought her food and occasionally some gin liquor i bought at the local store. i asked her questions about the life she had lived and the people she had known. the man she’d loved and the children she bore. i asked what she remembered of the man she knew as her father, which was not much at all.

it is the shortness of human life that breeds contentment with it. a life strung out in time can be an unhappy one. after she had passed along, myself older than when i had first arrived, i retreated once again into the mountains where i walked the woods for a century, sleeping high in the trees and lounging by the rivers. when i returned again, i found the world much changed. my descendants no longer bore my mark. they were unrecognizable to me, no trace of my wife or my daughter, no trace of me. and what they knew of our lives was precious little, names and perhaps a few dates. the cities we lived, and that was it. and i knew at that moment that something precious had slipped from the world. oblivion had swept in and papered over my life. i was alone in this world as no human had ever known, displaced by deep history, stranded in space.

and that is how many of us do it, periods of long withdrawal into the woods or the mountains or the deserts, places we are not likely to be found. and then we return to see what is still around worth remembering and what we lost to time. with each visit, we grow a little older, and so do not lose our humanity so much as we extend it.

there was at one point a great vampire die off. many of us returned from the woods and the mountains in the wake of the industrial revolutions to find the earth polluted, its people sick and atomized, society upended and rootless. this was the golden age of human-vampire relations. the age of polidori, le fanu & stoker. many hung around the collapsing nodes of western empire, emblems of its decadence, before themselves succumbing. what they had found worth living for apparently had disappeared. to a vampire, sentimentalism is death. as you can see.