There is a great deal of kinship for me between vampires and chronic illness.
Learning that you will be this way for the rest of your existence is a saddening and upsetting thought when you first understand it. But you don't really understand it, not until you've suffered through it. After the first year you think you know what it means, you think you can see the road ahead, but you still have memories of the past, you still remember being alive, and deep down you have a glimmer of hope that you will be alive again.
By the fifth year those memories are faded, a past that you are desperately trying to cling to as your mind begins to fail and the darkness of your existence is all that fills your meagre thoughts.
Trapped in a room, trapped in bed, it's hard not to feel like a parasite on those around you. Like you're draining the life of your friends and loved ones just to keep you alive. Relationships become unbalanced by the need for constant support, and even if people willingly give it, it still feels like theft.
After five years you may begin to grasp the distance yet to travel. Can you make it to ten? Will I make it to ten?
I was once a person. But my mind and body have wasted under a curse that has no cure, that few people care to understand save those who also suffer, and those who are burdened with our care. I see powerful people argue that our deaths would ease the burden on society, and I see more still swayed to this belief through their own hardships.
Will I survive the next five years or will my illness or the cruelty of others end my existence?
But after those five, what then? Another ten? How long before I am existing purely because I am unable to die? How much longer will my family live and sustain me before I have consumed them whole?
I cannot help how I was made,
I cannot help what I've become.
