A record of nights survived

[doorwatcherquietflame]

Matchday with Uncle Stavros

4th June 1985

Uncle Stavros used to drag me to games, rain or shine.

He wore that rally blue and white scarf like it was holy. South Melbourne Hellas, every week, every season. He'd sing the chants, curse the ref, lecture me on offside traps and dignity.

We didn't always win. Didn't matter. It was ours. A little corner of the world where being Greek wasn't a punchline or a box to tick on census night.

Today, I watched a match from the shadows of Lakeside. Just like old times. Cold breath in the air, meat on the grill, kids kicking cans in the stands.

I don't know the players now. Too many years, but the feeling is still the same. The rhythm of boots on turf. The rush of hope when the ball arcs just right.

A father and daughter sat by the fence. She wore a jersey two sizes too big under a fluffy pink coat, and kept yelling GO BLUE, even when South Melbourne didn't have the ball. He didn't correct her, just laughed and ruffled her hair.

That laugh hurt.

Because I'll never be that dad.

I'll never sit in that seat with a son or daughter beside me. Never share a scarf.

There are rules in Kindred society on procreation and reproduction. Most of us don't have the urge anymore. At the risk of creating Dhampir, it's practically prohibited. There's rumour that vampires can birth a baby, but it is said to be a horrifying experience.

Either way, I still cheer. Quietly, in my way, for a team that plays under lights I'll never stand beneath. For Uncle Stavros.

He wouldn't understand what I've become. But maybe he'd understand why I keep watching.

Because some things outlast even death.

[doorwatcherquietflame]

Socrates

12th May 1985

I read about Socrates tonight, the man who claimed to know nothing. Strange how that posture of ignorance became the highest form of wisdom. He walked the streets of Athens questioning craftsmen, politicians, poets. He exposed the hollowness of certainty and they killed him for it.

I think about his trial. The city could not bear the weight of a man asking questions that cut too deep. To live honestly, he said, is to examine life itself. The unexamined life is not worth living.

I wonder what he would make of mine. Nights blurred by hunger and violence, mornings locked away from the sun. I asked myself questions, but the answers felt like fragments. Do I live in an examined life, or only a documented one? These notebooks will pile up, but writing is not the same as knowing.

Constantine says little. He leaves me to stumble towards my own conclusions. Maybe that is the point. Socrates had no book, no doctrine. He lived through dialogue, through pressing others. Until truth leaked out like blood from a wound.

But here is the danger. Socrates trusted in the city of men. He believed reason could survive the mob. I know better. Kindred do not suffer gadflies. Questions can get you marked, silenced, ash in the wind.

Still, I keep asking. Maybe that is what writing is for me. A way of speaking Socratically, even if my only partner is the page.

[doorwatcherquietflame]

What They Burned in Carlton

23rd March 1985

I visited the old youth centre on the way home today.

Well, what's left of it.

It got burned down after funding cuts and the program folded. I knew that, of course. I'd read the article last year, but I hadn't seen the wreckage.

In fairness, the bureaucracy didn't cause the arson. It's just what happens when buildings in rough areas get forgotten about.

Now the talk is that the land is needed for development. It'll get turned into an apartment block.

It's the kids I think about. The ones that used to come through, because they had nowhere else to go; it was a safe home away from their actual home. I remember helping a group of teens paint a mural on the back wall. It was sunflowers, boxing gloves, broken chains - signatures of all the kids along one side. My own name, highest up, yet the smallest.

It's not even burnt down. Every skerrick of what was there is gone. It's been scraped flat, with a dull slab of concrete surrounded by temporary steel fencing.

As I stood there in the pre-dawn air, a breeze lifted dust from the edge of the lot. It smelled like paint, meat, char and smoke. A ghost of experiences past.

I didn't belong here, outside this blank pad in Carlton. I couldn't help them rebuild. I couldn't even protest the funding cuts or the demolition. I could only observe the aftermath from a rooftop, like I always do now. Detached from what is happening at ground level.

We built something once. We tried. Yet it was erased with a few permits and a bulldozer.

But it lives in me. In the mural that only I can see.

Maybe I'll write about it. Not for a paper. Not for a journal. Just so I don't forget that we tried to make something beautiful in a place that never wanted it.

They burned it down.

But I remember the fire we started there.

[doorwatcherquietflame]

No More Toilets

14th March 1985

I walked into the gents at Chasers tonight, half out of habit, half to check no one was doing anything more questionable than a bad shit or some vomit.

The stench was the same as ever - stale beer, old piss, bleach and cheap cologne. It's a smell that used to stick in my nostrils.

That's when it hit me. I haven't needed to piss or shit once since that night in Cremorne, about a year and a half ago.

Not once.

I've watched guys stagger off the dancefloor, clutching themselves, desperate for relief. I've stumbled upon scantily clad girls and women squatting behind dumpsters. Yet I stand there at the door as if made of stone. Not once has the urge stirred in me.

It's not something Constantine ever explained to me. He talked about the Beast, hunger, fire and fear. There was nothing about toilets, or any of the small things that have vanished.

I used to have a routine, as much as I hated it. A distinct tinkle of fluid splashing against beaten metal, wiping droplets of sweat from my brow and splashing water on my face before going back out into the endless noise.

It was mundane.

It was dirty.

It was human.

Now, there is nothing.

No build-up, no relief. No part of the cycle.

Just stillness.

It feels wrong, like a silence where there should be background noise. I didn't realise how much of my life was measured in those little interruptions... until they stopped.

Maybe that's what this whole thing is: a long list of small absences, stacked on on top of the other, until you don't know if you're a man anymore, or the mere ghost of one.

[doorwatcherquietflame]

Bagger

17th February 1985

Baggers are a weird group.

I met one in St Kilda who called himself Ian. He fed almost exclusively on Red Cross Blood Donor Centres or stole from hospitals. He argued that it was ethical, with no one being directly harmed, although I had my doubts.

Watching him work was a lesson in patience. He cultivated contacts among hospital orderlies, security guards, paramedics, cleaners, pretty much anyone willing to trade access for cash or favours. He didn't look like much of a fighter, but he didn't need to be. His network did all the heavy lifting.

Constantine came with me once to watch. I did wonder if he'd seen it before. However, he stood there, arms crossed, expression steady, eyes fixed on Ivan as if dissecting every move.

Afterwards, Constantine only said, "Calm is not always discipline. Sometimes it is just absence." His words carried no malice, no sneer, just a quiet judgment that cut more sharply than anger.

Part of me admired Ivan's minimalism. No hunts, no staged encounters, it's all just quiet logistics. It is efficient, even elegant.

But the blood he drank was cold, dead in every sense except appearance. I tried it, and it tasted like chalk, leaving me feeling emptier. Constantine's gaze never left mine as I wiped away the dregs from my lips, but he didn't need to say anything. I already knew what he meant.

Feeding, for me, is as much about the moment as the sustenance. Without the struggle, the risk, the presence, I think the Beast would feel hungrier, not less so.

Constantine's stillness reminded me of that. Disciple isn't dead blood. It's living control.

[doorwatcherquietflame]

Ouzo and Ash

17th December 1984

I lit incense tonight.

A ritual, from my father's side. Orthodox, old school, smoke curling through silence like a prayer without words.

I added ouzo to the flame. Stupid, maybe. But the smell? It hit something deep. Summers in a Footscray backyard, uncle Christos pouring drinks while we played cards. Music from the old cassette player. Laughter floating away in the darkness.

I sat in the dark with a glass in my hand, the clear liquid sitting nearly motionless, and knowing it wouldn't taste right. And it didn't. It just tasted of liquid ash.

It never does taste right.

The Beast does not hunger for tradition. It doesn't care about memory or culture or what a toast meant to your yiayia.

But I do.

I do, and it hurts.

Not physically, but certainly emotionally.

This time of year used to mean family. Feasts. Friendship. Catching up on all sorts of things. Now I avoid churches, avoid the lights, avoid the people who still remember the warmth of summer skin and shared meals.

Sometimes, I wonder if my rituals still mean anything. If memory is enough to honour the dead, even when you are the walking dead yourself.

Maybe I light incense because it's all I have left.

The ash on the plate doesn't care.

But I do.

[doorwatcherquietflame]

Alleycat

4th November 1984

The hunt is simple when you keep it closer to the street. That is the lesson I learned early, and it's why I have never strayed far from the Alleycat way.

It's direct, decisive and without the pretence of social manoeuvering.

My world is already full of alleyways, club back doors and shadowy car parks, long before the Embrace. The difference now is that my knuckles rarely bruise and the darkness works in my favour.

I have seen others who call themselves predators, but who could not stomach the immediacy of a hunt like this. I'm all about precision, knowing who I am taking, and taking them before the moment has time to grow complicated. In this, there is honesty.

That honesty is also a weight. You cannot dress it up with talk of "mutual benefit" or "performance art," as the Toreador might. You cannot point to a leader of transactions as the Ventrue do. You have your target, and then you have your hunger.

It keeps you sharp.

It keeps you honest with yourself, even if the Masquerade forces you to lie to everyone else.

[doorwatcherquietflame]

Nosferatu (1922)

20th October 1984

I found a VHS copy of Nosferatu, the original one, in a bargain bin. The tape was scratched, the sound hissed like breath through teeth, but the monsters still stepped out of the static.

Orlok, bent spine, clawed hands, rat face. No seduction, no poetry. Just hunger made into a figure that creeps across walls.

If the Hunger is silk, this was rot. Watching Orlok rise stiff from his coffin felt like looking into a mirror I'd avoided for over a year. The body isn't graceful. It moves like it's already dead. Every time he loomed into frame, I thought, "That's what I would look like without restraint. That's what Constantine made."

There are Kindred who look like Orlok all the time. It's the Nosferatu, just like the film. Their curse twists them, not just inside but out. Their skin like melted wax, jaws crooked, eyes sunken or bulging. No two the same, except for the fact that each face is one no mortal can bear to meet without flinching. They live as exiles, but not helpless ones.

They slip through alleys, sewer tunnels and forgotten corridors. More than that, they know how to vanish, even in a crowd. Not by beauty or charm, but by bending the gaze away, by making themselves part of the brickwork. People's eyes slide off them, never quite settling. You think you saw nothing until they are already gone. It's part of their lives, hiding from mortals.

I have the luxury of passing. I can work a door, blend in with the crowd, and feed carefully without drawing stares. The Nosferatu don't get that choice. Their very existence is a reminder of what we are when the Beast strips away the costume. In that, Orlok was closer to them than to me.

The townsfolk in that film treat him like he's diseased. A foreign pest, a plague that seeps through streets and beds. That hit close. My parents spoke of the Spanish flu, of cousins lost before they even left Greece. Migrants were whispered about as if they carried sickness.

Watching Orlok, I saw how old that story is. Vampirism was not a metaphor for the people who made this film. Rather, it was an accusation. Fear of the "other", but with teeth.

I sat there. When I got home, I noted that Orlok is truth without costume. No capes, no charm. Just the Beast, unmasked. That's why the film still claws its way under the skin. People don't want to believe that hunger can be this ugly. They'd rather have Lugosi in a tuxedo or Bowie in eyeliner. But the reality is closer to Orlok, and I know it.

When the tape ended, I rewound it, staring at the counter ticking back. I couldn't stop thinking of the sunlight scene. Orlok doesn't fight, just burns. Like he knew all along it would end that way.

Maybe that's the only mercy for monsters like us.

[doorwatcherquietflame]

Do they remember me?

15th September 1984

I watched my sister from a rooftop tonight.

She's older than I recall. Her hair's been cut shorter, the laugh is quieter, but it's her. Walking home from work with a takeaway bag and too much on her mind... like usual.

I didn't follow her. I just stood, hidden in shadow, like some memory made flesh.

I can't go and knock on her door to hold her. Can't tell her I still remember how she used to sneak biscuits into my school bag. That I still dream of our parents' backyard. That I still haven't forgotten her birthday.

I wrote her a letter earlier this year. Never posted it, just burned it instead.

Some nights, I wonder if she visits my grave. Do I even have a site for my unbody?

What does she remember of me?

I was trying to build something before the Embrace. Something that might have mattered. Now I can't even give her a phone call.

I told myself I wouldn't cry anymore.

There are drops of blood on the asphalt where I stood, being washed away in the light morning rain.

[doorwatcherquietflame]

The Beast

14th August 1984

I keep thinking I'll hear it as a snarl. I keep expecting it to be something inhuman, some monster whispering from the corners of my mind.

The truth is worse.

It sounds like me.

Not quite my voice, but close enough to make my stomach turn.

Same rhythm.

Same tone.

But all the softness is gone.

It doesn't argue.

It doesn't plead.

It tells me. Now. Take them. End it.

It doesn't care who's right or wrong.

It doesn't care about the mess it will leave behind.

It doesn't even care about the hunger most of the time... not really. It just... wants. Wants to see fear.

Wants to feel the pulse race and stop under my hand.

The worst thing? Some nights, I agree with it.

[doorwatcherquietflame]

The Word Embraced

9th August 1984

It was about a year ago, when Constantine later told me that was an Embrace. That was the word he used, as if it was noble, of softer, or less like what it really was.

I knew that word differently as a mortal. An embrace was warmth, like my mother holding me as a child, two friends clasping shoulders or lovers tangled in a moment of bliss, when the rest of the world disappears. It means safety, acceptance, and being seen.

History carries it differently. Embraces on battlefields tend to be tight and desperate, knowing it might be the last. In churches, at weddings and funerals, where arms hold together what words cannot. It has always been flesh meeting flesh with meaning.

Then there is the Kindred Embrace. A mouth at the neck, a shiver not of warmth but of cold. A taking, followed by the cruel gift of eternity. I remember mine too well. The hunger blooming like fire. The horror of blood that tasted too alive to refuse. Constantine standing calm, as if it was another rite of passage, like a 21st birthday or a first drunken kiss.

The words feel stolen, bent into a shape it does not deserve. It promises closeness but delivers distance. I have never felt more apart from humanity than in this so-called Embrace. It is not arms pulling you in, but teeth pulling you away.

[doorwatcherquietflame]

One Year Without a Mirror

4th August 1984

I covered the silver-backed glass the night I was Embraced. A year has passed and I still haven't looked.

Not once.

My reflection is like a friend I haven't seen and will never see again. I know the face is still there, but it no longer belongs to me. It is locked in a moment that will never change, frozen while the rest of the world keeps moving. To look would be to measure myself against a ghost, so better to keep the sheet in place.

Constantine never said anything about it. When I told him, he only nodded.

"The mirror is a distraction," he said. "Don't measure yourself against the glass or mirror. Measure yourself against what you can hold."

I learned that he never meant just iron of canvas. He meant form, habit, restraint. The weight of a choice carried out to its end.

That was his gift, as he called it, in the first year. Not warmth, not comfort. A steadiness I could brace against. He showed me that the tests were already in front of me. The page I could fill with words, the fists I could wrap in cloth, the hunger I could resist without frenzy. Each was a mirror of its own, clearer and more reflective than any mirror in the world.

So I wrote down numbers and drills, but also fragments of thought, scraps of essays, words that might hold me in place. I learned to measure not the face I had lost, but the discipline I could still build and maintain.

The mirror is still covered. The work remained. One year gone, and it was enough.

[doorwatcherquietflame]

Boxer's Hands, Predator's Hunger

15th July 1984

I don't bother with gloves, unless I'm sparring or in a proper fight. These days, the wraps are enough.

Cheap cotton bound tight over my knuckles and around my wrists. I can't get the smell of sweat out of them anymore. That's how they've smelt for years, off the back of countless hours of work in the gym, under the sting of leather on canvas, the sound of fists against the bag. Now, the sweat intermingles with spots of blood, reminding me that the rules have changed. Training and survival are not separate anymore.

When I throw a punch, the old rhythm returns: jab, guard, breathe, wait. Boxing is and was never about just punching someone. It was about watching, measuring, striking when the angle opened. The strange thing is how close that feels to the predator's rhythm. My Beast does not lash out blindly. It studies, waits, then drives everything into the kill. Boxer and predator share the same patience, the same hunger disguised as calm.

That unsettles me. I used to think discipline was the opposite of frenzy. But in the moment before a punch lands, I feel how thin the line is. One side is the fighter in me, shaping violence into craft. The other side is the Beast using craft as an excuse for violence.

The wraps blur that line too. They are supposed to protect the hands, but they also soak up what slips through - sweat, spit, blood. They carry the proof that control and hunger never stay cleanly apart.

I keep binding them anyway. Every time I wind the cloth around my fists, I tell myself I can keep the rhythm mine. Boxer's hands, not predator's claws. At least for one more night.

[doorwatcherquietflame]

The First Essay

26th June 1984

I found my original essay journal - cracked leather, pages stiff, crinkly with age.

On the yellowing pages, I found my first essay. I wrote it when I was 20, sitting in the detritus of a Carlton flat reeking of cheap coffee, bad weed and boxing liniment. The words were clumsy and loud - an argument for the dignity of the unloved. As a single man, I was an angry, idealistic human.

Reading it now was like watching a ghost play at being alive. I run my fingers over the sentences and feel the longing, but the fire behind them is distant, dulled by nights of blood and silence. The ideas still stand, but my faith in change has worn thin.

As I got to the end, I wondered, "What would this essay say to the Kindred?"

I don't have an answer yet.

One thing did strike me. I used to write to change something out there. To fight injustice, to make the unseen visible. Now I write to keep something alive in here. To stop the hunger from swallowing the last of me.

The essay saved me once. It gave shape to my anger and direction to my fists. Maybe writing can save me again. Maybe it already is.

The difference is sharp. Back then, words were a weapon against the world. Now, they are a cage for the Beast. It's a reminder that thought still matters. That dignity isn't just something we fight for in others, but something I have to protect in myself.

Maybe this is why I started filling these cheap notebooks. For me, to remember, to survive.

[doorwatcherquietflame]

Why I write

12th Mary 1984

The nights stretch too long, and silence fills it with the wrong kind of thoughts. For months, I tried to bury them under fists, work and hunger, but thoughts rot when left alone. They come back sharper, closer to the Beast. Boxing steadies me for an hour at a time. When the gloves come off, there is no bell loud enough to keep the mind wandering.

Last month, I finished The Lord of the Rings. Frodo carried his burden step by step, knowing it wore him down, knowing that there was no real return for him. What mattered was that he bore it long enough for others to breathe free. It is a story of weight, temptation, and surviving by refusing to let go of what hope demanded.

It struck me harder than I expected. I do not have a Ring, but I carry something just as corrosive. Some nights, it feels like the hunger gnaws at the same edges Tolkien described, hollowing memory, eating away at what I once was.

That's why I bought a pack of these notebooks. Simple ring-bound, lined with faint black lines, with enough structure to let me write anywhere. It opens flat, built to be used instead of admired. A worker's tool, every page a place to hammer down what would otherwise rattle endlessly in my skull.

This is not confession, not memory, not even philosophy, though it will borrow their voices. It is survival.

But it is also refusal. The Beast thrives on forgetting. Each lost habit, each silence, is an invitation to vanish. Writing is my refusal. To remember, to resist, to carry the weight without being carried away.

If nothing else, those pages will remain, even if they end up as ash.

This is why I write.

[doorwatcherquietflame]

The Hunger

24th April 1984

I saw The Hunger tonight.

I walked into a Carlton cinema alone, coat zipped up too high, and sat in the back where no one would look twice.

The posters promised style: Bowie, Deneuve, Sarandon. The film delivered silk curtains, pale faces, music that felt like incense... vampires as art.

I should have walked out.

It was so far from my nights that it should have felt ridiculous.

But there was something sharp under the gloss. Catherine Deneuve's character discards lovers when they begin to decay, trapping them in coffins to rot but never die. That hit harder than any cape-and-fang monster.

Immortality - not as a fist but as slow suffocation.

Constantine never said what would happen when I began to wear down. Watching those trapped and twitching bodies, I realised he didn't need to. The image was enough.

The film sells vampirism as seduction. Music, fashion, smoke trailing from lips. Desire sharpened into aesthetics. The Hunger made beautiful. What I saw was loneliness in every frame. Lovers taken and tossed aside. Hunger disguised as passion. Death wrapped in silk. No different from the elders at Elysium who talk about "lineage" and "eternity" while hiding the fact that they feed and discard, feed and discard.

When I walked back into the night, Lygon Street smelt like grease and beer. No silk curtains, no sarabands. Just hunger.

The movie wanted me to believe in beauty. I know better. There is no art in draining someone until their knees buckle. There is only restraint or frenzy.

Still, part of me understood why mortals want it dressed this way. They want to believe monsters kiss as much as they kill. They need it to look like love. Perhaps it's the lie that allows them to sleep.

[doorwatcherquietflame]

The therapy of the ring

7th April 1984

The gym smelt of sweat and old leather, with a tinge of iron and copper mixed in. The heavy bag swayed slowly in the corner, split and patched like me... or a teacher's jacket.

Constantine tossed me the wraps without a word. Winding them tight was an automatic motion, even with the Hunger pulling at every fibre of my being. My body remembered boxing, but now every strike carried weight beyond fists and canvas.

He stood behind me, calm as stone, while I worked the bag.

"Don't waste yourself," he said, when my punches grew wild. "Every strike counts. Every blow is a choice."

His voice never rose, never pressed. He could turn and force correction into law without moving a muscle.

The Hunger made me reckless. The bag split again under my fists, my breathing ragged with effort... even though I don't need to breathe anymore. Constantine didn't flinch. He stepped closer, steady, presence alone slowing me.

"The ring is a mirror," he said. "You learn who you are in there."

That line stuck. The ring was no longer just a cage of ropes, but rather a place where frenzy met restraint, where the Beast in me was forced into form and technique. Boxing was not about winning rounds anymore. It was meditation hammered into every movement.

Every blow is a choice. The ring is a mirror. Boxing had been a form of therapy for me when I was alive. Constantine sharpened that therapy into philosophy. His calm didn't soothe me, but cut me clean..

In that cut, I found the first shape of control.