Shadows and Light Page #2
What if you were a vampire alone in the world, drifting through life after a couple decades of uncertainty. You aren't sure what you are looking for anymore. On a whim, you apply to volunteer at a local retirement home for university credit. This story denies both traditional and modern depictions of vampires. The usual, overplayed plotlines of romance and male domination are disregarded in this unique and tender love story.
Autumn 24
You play chess or cards or audiobook roulette with this one old woman, husband dead thirty years ago in a half-forgotten war, listening to her stories, laughing genuinely for the first time in a while. It’s strange, because you would have thought that the hope for humanity would have been in the new generation, but here it is, sitting right in front of you as she takes your queen with a crinkly smile. Bit by bit, her stories become reality for you. Her wheezing laugh is the best thing you hear all day, you give up on your farce all together, ignoring phone calls from the professors decades younger than you asking where you’ve been, where are your assignments. You don’t understand what it is, at first, because you’ve only ever experienced it through youthful passion and fanciful romance and imaginary scenes. But eventually you realize that the tingling feeling you get every time she pats your hand or beats you at checkers or waves goodbye is… love. You love her. So deeply and irrevocably that, the night you realize it, you stare up at your dark ceiling in awe, trying to comprehend it. The next day you go in with a smile and a laugh and conversation, hiding sorrow behind your expression because your love is one that can never be revealed. Not in this body, not with this face. Your outward appearance of someone barely even twenty would never fit with the wisened wrinkles of the face and hands in front of you. She asks you what’s wrong and you change the subject, asking for more stories about a war you fought in, the one her husband died in. You pretend to be a history buff, except for the fact that you know too many little things about this one war and not enough about the rest of the world, but she doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. You think, or maybe hope, that she notices and knows and realized everything, and just doesn’t show it because she knows your love can never be, too. After all, your own recollections sometimes slip through and she looks at you with an odd expression, never asking the question. She lived through it, but maybe cannot tell anymore what outside people might know about it, though you hope in a desperate kind of way that she can. Despite the fact the notices from the university have piled up in your voicemail, email, and paper mail, despite the fact your professors have dropped you from every class and the semester is long over anyway, when you go home each night you stare at blank canvas or paper, fingers itching to rectify their lack of colour. The whole world deserves colour. You have tasted it again for the first time in what feels like millennia, and feel a deep need to see it spread out before you. Covering white canvas like it’s covered your white skin, your worn heart. First you draw it. Pencils, charcoal, pastels, pencil crayons, markers, pens. Careful strokes, wild lines. Intricate scribbles. Then watercolour. Watercolour pencils, paint pans, paint tubes, brushes. Thick watercolour paper, water tinted with a thousand swirling colours that always seem to mix to a muddy grey. Acrylic, canvas, pallets, thick globs covering faint pencil lines, drying fast as your hands go faster. Oil paints, pricey and magnificent. They make you feel austere. That’s not the feeling you are going for. Colour is warm, it is cold, it is brilliant. Neon, bright, pale, subdued. Never dull, never grey, never shaded. Everything has strange lighting because you refuse to make things darker, only lighter. Digital is a dream, you can do anything with only two tools and your hands and practice. Soon you’re mixing mediums, sometimes almost painting your screen with ink or acrylic or thick, pigmented marker before you realize you picked up the wrong work. Paper, canvas, screen. Art, art, art. It’s not long before you have what seem like hundreds or thousands of images, all of her. It takes far longer, however, for you to notice that you’ve hidden yourself in the background of each one, always in the darkest part of the image, lurking, peering at the light you cannot dare to touch. It is beautiful and it is sad and it is magnificent. But maybe one day she dies and you are set out, adrift, upon the world. She has to eventually. Or maybe instead she finds someone else in the retirement home, falls in love, and marries them for her last years on earth. Maybe you look on as their love develops, maybe you help kindle it. Maybe you find yourself relinquishing your seat more and more often to the person she looks at with a soft kindness you thought was reserved only for you You would never separate them. Even if there was a way for you to become human, to look your true age, you wouldn’t take this happiness away from her. You could never take anything away from her. It’s part of the reason that makes this love so different from your juvenile loves of before. When she does die, it’s peaceful. A final breath exhaled into a dark night as you enter the room and crouch by her side, picking up her hand one last time, running smooth fingers along her age spots and wrinkles as silent tears drip down your face. You leave before the partner wakes, before the nurses come around to all the rooms. You leave and you never return. An apartment sits filled with paintings of a bright, beautiful woman, an unfinished drawing, unfinished canvas, unfinished file all detailing the beginnings of new projects which her features were always meant to spill onto. As the years pass and you get older on the inside, the love holds onto you, tearing you apart one decade and healing you the next. The years blur more and more until you aren’t even sure how old you are anymore, how many centuries may have passed. You never fall fully in love again, and you don’t want to. Instead, you find beauty in the little things. You smile at the child sticking his nose in the air as he bosses his friends around during a game of catch; you reach toward the woman sitting on a bench, sorting cards and muttering to herself; you watch, heart breaking again and again, while that one old lady, with hair like hers, crosses the street, while that one man laughs through wheezing fits and tears, while that one little girl sitting on the curb beats her little brother at chess. You fall in love again and again and again. For maybe two hundred years after she died, you deny that all those things you love about the people around you are the things you loved about her. In sorrow and pain, you turn away from the feelings and run across the world.
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"Shadows and Light Books." Literature.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2025. Web. 9 Jan. 2025. <https://www.literature.com/book/shadows_and_light_3671>.
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