Some people refer to creatures like me as angels fallen into darkness.

Most whisper my name in fear and horror.

Curse me as evil.

The devil incarnate.

Unnatural being.

Vampire.

Call me what you like. I am what I am. I fully rejoice in it all.

They recoil at the way we live, easily slipping through time and shadow, always in a trail of death and despair.

But it is they who will never have the opportunity to see the cold wonder of the night, its beauty frozen by the cold blowing sharply in the still night air. They will never know what it means to feel the sharp wind slice into you, or taste the ecstasy of life in all its splendor in the blood that pulsate through your own veins.

Above all, they will never know and understand the bittersweet complexity of who I am.

Nevertheless, these frail and ignorant human beings never cease to amaze me.

One human being in particular.

She was, how you would say, as pure as light, untainted from the blood and horror that I had come to only see and know around me. She could find such simple happiness in tending to her meager garden, as she took care of herself and her ailing younger sister. Her laughter was like the sound of sweet chimes in the summer and her voice a welcome soothing antidote to the howls and cries that plagued my mind.

And yet, her innocence only served to painfully remind me how corrupted I had become.

This very immoral existence in which I was neither alive nor dead, I had forsaken everything that was me, including my own soul. I am without a soul and yet the way she looked at me hinted otherwise. She would glance at me and somehow I could feel like there was a tiny spark of a soul that remained inside of me.

You could say she had been a source of redemption for a pathetic soulless wretch.

Contrary to what people may think, vampires are just as capable of love.

After all, it is merely an emotion among other things that remained with me once I began to live this god forsaken existence. Just because I joined the ranks of the damned, I was still, in a way, human. My body, my thoughts and emotions are still my own.

The change only served to sharpen everything that I am. My strength, among other things, are extraordinary. Where I once could barely move a full barrel to being able to lift a whole truckload with a mere finger. My perception of everything around me are no longer restricted by humanity's limited senses. I can see the fragile veins and sweet dew drops on every single leaf of a tree two hundred meters away from me. I can hear the heartbeat of a sparrow fifty feet in the air. And of course, my hunger for human food and drink were replaced by the never ending thirst for blood, to put it bluntly.

Now don’t think me as merely a mindless animal, incapable of all thought and reason simply because of my craving for that bittersweet taste of blood, that wonderful crimson elixir that perpetuates my unnaturally long and tragic existence.

I know how to control my urges, unlike he who shall remain unidentified for now.

Nevertheless, I almost believed that I could truly be happy again. With her, I could easily be the same blissful ignorant fool I had been before I was thrust into a world of shadows.

Of course, just as easily as I found her, I lost her.

He had killed her, claiming that I was a shame to our kind for becoming ‘soft’ over a human. I remember gazing into her eyes while her precious lifeblood spilled onto the ground. I was lost in the sorrow, howling in grief in the bitter remnants deep inside of myself over her soul to properly read in her eyes what she was trying to tell me. I was too devastated to care about anything else but to hold her close to me, keeping her on this plane of existence with me for as long as I could.

I held her in my arms until she breathed her last sweet breath. Her eyes remained open, sadly looking up into my own, when she died. They stared lifelessly at me while I held her. They no longer held the familiar sparkle and warmth I had grown to love about her. Her dark brown eyes still haunt me to this day.

The love. The hate. The anguish. The loss. I truly believe that everything eventually returns full circle.

For I am immortal. I have seen much and have found that history ruthlessly repeats itself.

I had foolishly thought that she would come back as well. For someone as experienced and learned as I, little did I know that love is a complex concept that continues to elude me even to this day.

The more I learn about this so called ’love’, the less I know.

I find that the more I observe human beings, they seem to be able to exercise it easily enough without a second thought. They are more than they think and yet they seem so unaware of everything around them, as if they are but newborns, content to live blindly throughout their life, cuddled contentedly upon life’s bosom.

Yes, humanity never ceases to amaze me.