Le Conseiller: Apollo Victor Helling
Title: Translucent
AN: Like with Ladislav, Apollo tends to title his journal entries. This is one of his longer ones.
While I traversed the seas I often felt that their peaks were like mountains ready to swallow me to my death. To drown was the closest I was to falling upwards. As a human I feared almost everything, maybe because I was sick and diseased. Yet as a vampire I simply imagined what fear was like. It was like a robot that could recognize emotions yet never had the capacity to understand them. The robots, though, always seemed to have the most eloquent way of explaining something they did not understand, and humans had a hard time explaining everything because they felt it too closely, and too deeply.
When I became a vampire I became sadistic; not because I hated everything, but because I loved everything too much and I no longer had the ability to truly understand what being human was like. I was free of sickness but cursed to always remember what I lacked. If I felt any emotion for anything it was like a dying gasp: fleeting and then gone. Any emotions I felt was the very definition of brevity. I was angry often that I could witness emotion, describe it with such an academic tongue, but never feel it anymore. The emotion was on the tip of my tongue but it leapt away, back down my throat, before I could properly identify the flavor.
I imagined myself like a floating carcass on the seas I often traveled in my younger days. My skin had become translucent and was slowly dissolving down into the depths, waiting for a predator to come and claim my corpse. I imagined that the sea was emotion and I was dead upon it. It rubbed my skin, it caressed me at times, but often I was unaware of it for how can a corpse feel anything when it no longer has the conscious to feel anything? Apollo Victor Helling was gone and what was left was but a remnant of him. Even in my moments of greatest sickness as a human, I could claim to be myself entirely, but now I can only claim to be two thirds of myself. I was greedy as a human and greedier still as a vampire. I imagined that the one third I sacrificed was more precious than the two thirds I owned still. I was covetous just as much then as I am now. I will never admit to being a good creation, because I even recognize that I am not. Whatever true goodness I could have had as a human had become a mere imitation as a vampire. If I spare a human today it is only because I will feast on them tomorrow. What might not be a meal one day may certainly become one the next. If I am pleasant with someone, it is usually only to gain profit from it. I have only one true friend, and he would rather that I leave him be than talk to him.
I agonized to be with humans though I often loathed their company. I was a paradox. I wanted to be with people, but when I understood that I would still never be able to feel what they felt-I suffered. The problem was: I kept doing the same thing over and over again. I would walk among people, go to their taverns, pretend to eat their food, but when I had been with them long enough-I began to wail in agony to myself. They were mocking me. Those once bubbling face were like masks of demons and ghosts. They were taunting me with their innocence, and their emotion. Daily I would come to the bowels of hatred and swim in the brine, only to rise to the banks and bask in self-pity. That was one thing I could feel, and feel often: self-pity. I pitied nothing but myself.
The greatest thing I lamented when I would sit by the fire brooding, like all dark figures in novels do: was the fact that I had willingly given up my humanity to become a vampire. I had given it all up and the only one to blame was I. That was my greatest tragedy. The one person I could blame for all the suffering I had was not God, it was not another man, it was not even the vampire who made me, no, it was myself; and that alone made me we weep the tears I did not have the capacity any longer to cry.
Even still, the one vampire I knew who could cry true tears was suffering even more than I, and that just made my waterless tears all the more painful to stomach. I truly was a corpse floating on sea I could no longer feel. I was trapped to forever be but a shadow of what I could have been. Self-pity was the caress that often was the only thing I could ever feel rub up against me. It was the plank that I laid beside in the sea: it was pointless to a dead corpse like me, but it was the one thing I could cling to, because it was the only thing I had left from the wreckage of my soul.
AN: Like with Ladislav, Apollo tends to title his journal entries. This is one of his longer ones.
While I traversed the seas I often felt that their peaks were like mountains ready to swallow me to my death. To drown was the closest I was to falling upwards. As a human I feared almost everything, maybe because I was sick and diseased. Yet as a vampire I simply imagined what fear was like. It was like a robot that could recognize emotions yet never had the capacity to understand them. The robots, though, always seemed to have the most eloquent way of explaining something they did not understand, and humans had a hard time explaining everything because they felt it too closely, and too deeply.
When I became a vampire I became sadistic; not because I hated everything, but because I loved everything too much and I no longer had the ability to truly understand what being human was like. I was free of sickness but cursed to always remember what I lacked. If I felt any emotion for anything it was like a dying gasp: fleeting and then gone. Any emotions I felt was the very definition of brevity. I was angry often that I could witness emotion, describe it with such an academic tongue, but never feel it anymore. The emotion was on the tip of my tongue but it leapt away, back down my throat, before I could properly identify the flavor.
I imagined myself like a floating carcass on the seas I often traveled in my younger days. My skin had become translucent and was slowly dissolving down into the depths, waiting for a predator to come and claim my corpse. I imagined that the sea was emotion and I was dead upon it. It rubbed my skin, it caressed me at times, but often I was unaware of it for how can a corpse feel anything when it no longer has the conscious to feel anything? Apollo Victor Helling was gone and what was left was but a remnant of him. Even in my moments of greatest sickness as a human, I could claim to be myself entirely, but now I can only claim to be two thirds of myself. I was greedy as a human and greedier still as a vampire. I imagined that the one third I sacrificed was more precious than the two thirds I owned still. I was covetous just as much then as I am now. I will never admit to being a good creation, because I even recognize that I am not. Whatever true goodness I could have had as a human had become a mere imitation as a vampire. If I spare a human today it is only because I will feast on them tomorrow. What might not be a meal one day may certainly become one the next. If I am pleasant with someone, it is usually only to gain profit from it. I have only one true friend, and he would rather that I leave him be than talk to him.
I agonized to be with humans though I often loathed their company. I was a paradox. I wanted to be with people, but when I understood that I would still never be able to feel what they felt-I suffered. The problem was: I kept doing the same thing over and over again. I would walk among people, go to their taverns, pretend to eat their food, but when I had been with them long enough-I began to wail in agony to myself. They were mocking me. Those once bubbling face were like masks of demons and ghosts. They were taunting me with their innocence, and their emotion. Daily I would come to the bowels of hatred and swim in the brine, only to rise to the banks and bask in self-pity. That was one thing I could feel, and feel often: self-pity. I pitied nothing but myself.
The greatest thing I lamented when I would sit by the fire brooding, like all dark figures in novels do: was the fact that I had willingly given up my humanity to become a vampire. I had given it all up and the only one to blame was I. That was my greatest tragedy. The one person I could blame for all the suffering I had was not God, it was not another man, it was not even the vampire who made me, no, it was myself; and that alone made me we weep the tears I did not have the capacity any longer to cry.
Even still, the one vampire I knew who could cry true tears was suffering even more than I, and that just made my waterless tears all the more painful to stomach. I truly was a corpse floating on sea I could no longer feel. I was trapped to forever be but a shadow of what I could have been. Self-pity was the caress that often was the only thing I could ever feel rub up against me. It was the plank that I laid beside in the sea: it was pointless to a dead corpse like me, but it was the one thing I could cling to, because it was the only thing I had left from the wreckage of my soul.