Short story: « Dear my love »

🇫🇷 Cette histoire n’est disponible qu’en anglais.
🇺🇸
This story is only available in English

Dear Emily,

Please do not throw this letter away as soon as you realize it is from me. Even if you do hate me. I know you do not want to think of me, but please consider reading it entirely. In consideration for what we once were.

I am writing this letter to you because… It’s been so long. I miss you, very much. And because I hope that what I have written in these first lines is not true anymore. I’d like to think that as time has passed, you may now think of me, of our days together, more fondly these days. That what has happened to you has made you reconsider things a bit.

Since you left me, I have been adrift. They say time passes quickly when you’re having fun… So from my point of view, it may as well have been three hundred years since I last saw your face. Five hundred, perhaps, since I last saw you smiling at me.

I love you. Even now, I love you, and my heart, though you may claim I don’t have one, is still yearning for you. I have been trying to keep in touch with some of our common acquaintances, to know how you were doing. Don’t be mad at them for that, they were often quite unwilling to answer my questions, but as you know, I can be quite persuasive.

It is how I learnt about what had happened to your husband and your son.

I hope you’ll believe me when I say I am truly sorry for your loss. Nothing I can say could possibly cover the extent of the grief you must have been feeling, so I will write of this no more.

You left me, all those years ago, telling you did not want to see me ever again.

I’m now reaching out hoping that you may have changed your mind, or may change it in the future.

Your position is now close to mine. I have lost my family too, and the thing I am the most terrified in the whole world is to lose someone again. It is why I don’t know, really know, that many people. I’ve seen too much death, and I had thought I had closed my heart forever until I met you, for I feared it would break completely if I were to suffer any more losses.

I’ve already told you about my three wives, and my seven children, beautiful boys and girls whose laughter I’d swear I can sometime still hear in the wind. I promise I never lied to you when I told you their stories. They were the lights of my life. But these lights were snuffed all too quickly. And I did not want to feel like that ever again.

However, Emily, when I met you, I fell for you so fast, so deeply, when I thought my heart had become an impenetrable fortress… It really surprised me. And the more I knew you, the more we dated, kissed, loved each other, the more I knew I could not live without you.

This is why I confessed the truth to you.

I knew it was risky. I knew you would doubt me, and that it came in contradiction of what your Christian education had you believing. This is why I showed everything to you.

Thinking about it now, I regret my actions deeply. I… never thought you’d be that upset. I believed, and as I write it I realize you might think that this next sentence is placing the blame on you, but I swear it is not, I believed that our love was stronger than that. I realize now that I was a fool, and that it was never a question of the strength of our love. But my long time walking this Earth had caused me, I’m afraid, to lose sight of proper etiquette. I know this is late, but I want to apologize deeply for hurting you and using your butler, I believe his name was Jerome, to show off my powers to you.

I believe, however, that with the deep losses you have suffered these last years, you may be more understanding of my predicament. I am all alone in this world. I believe you now understand how soul-crushing that is.

My proposal to you is the same that it was all these years ago.

Be with me. Live with me. Be mine again. Let me make you, now and forever, a being of the night. I will never leave your side, and you will never leave mine, and we’ll be able to fill the hole in each other’s heart.

I swear to you there is no truth in fiction. There is no eternal damnation. No constant feeling of cold. No scares of holy places, and no sudden weird allergies to food… And though I do dislike sunny places, it is more because my eyes to the light than out of a fear of disappearing in dust.

There is just me. A man who has been living for a long time, and who is able to, once in a while, give that ability to someone else. Avoid eternal oblivion. Forget about old age. And avoid loneliness, both for you and me.

I hope that you’ve read this letter this far, my love. Please leave a handkerchief out your window if you’d like me to come and visit you. Now, in a year, in ten, it doesn’t matter. I’ll be there when you’re ready.

I’d give you an address to write me back… But I’ve had a few unfortunate encounters with witch hunters and the likes these past few years, and I’d like to avoid bad surprises in the event this letter was to be read by a third party. I’m sure you understand.

From the bottom of my heart, I hope that I’ll be seeing you soon.

I love you, dear my love,

Vlad