the saddest part is, every ten years i have to start again. ten years feels like ten minutes, when you're as old as me. i can't even remember when i was born. all i can remember is that once i was a child, back in the days before mirrors, staring at the backs of knees, stung in the face by long grass. before the hunger set in.

and i can look back across centuries, maybe even millenia. oceans of time. i am as constant as breath and keep on going. those endless faces, they change so rapidly that they all blur into one. just voiceless ghosts. but every now and then, there is an original. an old-soul. you remember them from dreams, maybe, or from the black worlds of anti-matter before you were born. they look into your eyes, void-deep, and it burns straight through. like a sunspot that never fades. or a hole in your soul, if you have one.

and so you seek them out, you run through countless seasons, chasing shadows, your heart an insane and empty compass, navigating wildly. they become magnetic north, your everlasting attachment. but you will be denied until the end of time.

so anyway, i start again. i can never grow old, but those faces around me, they sag and they crease, the hair thins and turns grey. so on i go. or else my cover is blown. and him, he's always one step ahead. hunted like prey over space and time.

and sometimes you forget, you become so immersed, you succumb to the illusion of the present, and you feel so weak that all you can do is go home, and put on your best dress, and HUNT.

and later on, when you've left them sleeping, you look in the mirror and that sunspot is still a sorry silver coal in the hollow of your eye, and you blink away the tears, and his voice starts whispering. and he repeats those words over and over again, from that millisecond when he loved you, and you know you can never stop.

so you're chasing him down. you try to summon him from leaves and trees and Lady Datura smiles and licks your brain completely clean of sense and reason. you get more and more out of your head but with every blink you see his face and you crash into another decade, leaving friends and lovers behind, starting again and again and again. and friends children and grand-children, one face replacing the next, and still you go on.

and eventually you evolve, and you learn to feed on thoughts instead, so you target the weak, and now it is into your arms these fragile prey troop, and as they explain their miasma of pains, you grow fat and strong and your battle-scars heal and you feel READY. you'll find him. soon you will be able to shape-shift too. and overhead, the sunspot tumours the sky.

so as you're fucking, the music is violent, and all this feels like a smack in the face, but when that flash comes you are ready, and you breathe his energy into you and you know you just added another ten years, you've bought a little more time. and this makes you smile and bless him, he thinks it was him. and you're putting on your underwear and your eyes are empty and you don't hear a word he says. and you don't look back, and you don't see him close the door.

and you've heard the tales, read the books, and you know what they say. but they're wrong. noone knows what it's like, not really. and all these soulless people, they struggle for immortality, and yours is like a punishment, the prison of the hyper-real. here you are, serving a million lifetimes, sucking out souls with unbelievable clarity; the victims, they never forget your face, and are haunted until the end of time by that stellar cold in your eye. and The Logos starts to speak and it's your voice they hear but by then you are lightyears away. you are caught by the lip on his terrible fish-hook and you fear you will never smile again.

and so you execute precisely. just a little bit of life-force, here and there. you steal soul and memories and leave an empty space that borders on stupidity. you create vacant lots, zealots, followers. bastard children, who think of nothing but you. everything is framed by you. and you just don't give a shit. they are beneath you. your eye is trained on the sun. on him.

and you have so much time to sit and think. you ignore the letters, the knocks on the door. you've taken all you need from them. and maybe it's like they say, a vampire creates others of it's kind, so these people are desperate and hollow inside, hungry for you. you've taken their very core away and they don't even realise, they don't understand how it works, the art of feeding. but you've taken away their pain as well as everything else. it's a kindness, really. and you sit in the dark and smoke and try to sing the songs you learned on your mothers knee, but they are all spoiled now, they hold too many memories. you're absolutely choked with other peoples emotions, but yours still float on the top, like terrible foam.

and sometimes you run with the wind and spend hours going nowhere, all the world a green bruise, and you let yourself listen to those songs and you have to blink into the sun to hide your tears. and so you chose another victim right there on the path and you're just biding your time but you know no matter how many lives you swallow, no matter how many years you gain, it will never be enough. even living forever. imagining an everlasting k-hole of time: your heart like an ice-berg before a child with a single match. it all just seems impossible. if only you could forget!

and of course, you have your ways of trying; lines of powdered root and bark, wine-glasses murky with pink liquid, small bitter rolls of leaves; but none match that first high, that pure, clean, natural buzz. happiness? it's all just a matter of chemistry to you now anyway. you've thought about it often enough to know it was a clash of hormones and endorphins and pheremones. you could almost write an equation for it, that's how textbook-pure biology it all was. it amuses you to devalue it like this, to make it seem insignificant, or at the very least, as inevitable as matter. just rocks in space. a dead comet in endless free-fall, blackened and burned and dead. like you, from the neck up.

and you wish it was all just as easy as a stake through the heart, but yours is diamond-hard. yours is coal. and it has been broken and crushed and as sharp as glass for years now, and yet here you are. the living dead. you curse the one who gave you this hunger and took away even the promise of the grave, and how he knew exactly what he was doing. but one day, one day, maybe you'll find him, and with a single kiss you will pour into him all the sorrows of the world. it will choke him completely.

and oh yeah, this was about me, but i'm just saying. it's how it would be for you too.