Friday, January 18, 2008

Waitering for Forever


The Montreat’s lounge is all leather and slow music. There’s a smoking section, probably one of the last one’s left on Earth, and I park myself. I only drum my hands on the table for a minute before I realize that if I sit here too long I’m going to start getting nervous. I order a drink and a pack of smokes. Neither arrive as quickly as I’d like. I start devouring both and order a second drink in seconds. I only have about an hour before the meeting and I see no harm in drinking while I wait. Damn, who shows up early to selling out? For all I knew, Nod Templar were already all over the place. Maybe that guy behind the booth was a werewolf, catching the scent of my fear. Maybe that shadow had an entire army, waiting to kill me. You could think all day about dying, if you really let yourself go. It was such a weird feeling to have to really think about death as something that was coming someday. When you’re immortal, when you’re a vampire living off perishable things, you never really waited for anything. You were either doing it or not. You were assuming a set of risks or there were no risks at all. I’d gone through so much crazy stuff the past few days, the first time I’d ever really done anything outside the hospital as a human, and I think it was getting to me. All this stuff that people did to stay alive, vampires or human, everyday and it never ended until you died. I downed the drink and ordered another. At least you could drink while you waited. And smoke. Or you could just finish the suspense, stand up on stage, and die. How could people live with those kinds of options? How do you endure it? I suddenly wished Ferris was here. I wished she was talking to me, telling me we were just alike and that we would endure it together. I wished the kid was there. Asking me how I did it. Asking me for tips, so I could believe that I really did know what I was doing. Even Dingo would’ve been nice, asking me where we would score our next slurp. Just to not have to do all this alone, this never ending act of staying alive. The third drink came and went. I never lost track of the time. I stared at the clock and watched each minute tick by. I watched it so hard that I almost didn’t notice a figure slip out of the shadows and sit in the booth next to me. “Hello Shade,” said Sunshine.

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