Red Velvet and Absinthe

Author:Mitzi Szereto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cleis Press
Published: 2011-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

I watched her. In the beginning, I told myself it was so I could be sure she was all right, thin justification to be sure, but altruistic enough to let my conscience rest easy. Autumn turned to winter, and winter to spring, and justification fell away forgotten as the waif from the alley, the girl in whose arms I’d known such peace, became an obsession. Lily was fleshed out, her substance and detail intimately ingrained in me. Her warmth and compassion; the focus and concentration she applied to her studies and painting alike; the grace with which she carried herself; the elegant line of her profile; the husky sound of her laughter: I knew it all. To look upon her filled me with more warmth than the heat of any fire, and the memory of her taste sustained me more than any blood I took through all the long winter nights.

What would it be like, I wondered, to let her know me? To have her walk beside me? It had been so long since I’d had a companion that I could scarcely remember what it was to share a life, a bed, even simple conversation. Such happiness seldom gifted my kind.

In the beginning…in the beginning we are all enamored of our strength and vitality and the prospect of eternity. It’s human nature to want to share that with someone; it was how I’d been made, and I in turn had been no exception, passing on my blood to my lover filled with romantic ideals of forever. But we are not human, though conscience and human sensibility remains, and in the end, very few of us have the strength to endure the passage of centuries and the endless horror of the blood. I’d lost my maker and lover both. They’d gone willingly into the sun, weeping bloodstained tears and whispering a quiet no more.

I wouldn’t condemn Lily to that fate, no matter how much I wanted her, no matter how lonely I was. She deserved to live a life filled with warmth and light, waking each morning wrapped in a loving embrace, raising fat babies and growing old on a front-porch swing. But though I wouldn’t bring her into my world, I found I couldn’t entirely leave hers either.

And so I watched her, this girl, from the dark, from the shadows. Seasons became years, and I watched her finish college, watched her working late into the night at the coffee shop across the street from her flat to supplement her income as a young artist. I watched, in time, as she fell in love with another woman, watched their passion burn brightly and then fade, watched the arguments, and finally, watched the end.

I watched her cry, my Lily, and felt my heart breaking right along with hers. Her pain, perhaps even more than her happiness, drew me to her, just as it had that night in the alley. And she was hurting so much… how could I do other than help

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