Languid Dreamer

    Time is like a river. You can reach your hand into it and feel the water in between your fingertips, and even take a jar and keep some of it for yourself, scrutinizing the dirt and leaves that float in the murkiness. But you can’t keep it all forever, and nor can you stop its flow. The best way to go about it is to build a raft out of sticks and dreams and let yourself fall adrift.

    No one knows this more than Ramón Espinosa. 

    Four hundred years of unlife make days fall through his fingers like sand in the hourglass , the flow leaving a slight sensation and few stray grains in the crevices of his hand. 

    Three years of waking memory means every moment is strained in perpetual eternity, every interaction is a fuzzy familiar something that makes false breath hitch. When everything is new and yet so well-worn, everything begins to blend together. A mirage of brand new dances that he knows every step to like an old favorite, conversations he knows every word to back and forth but still keeps learning new things from, and experiences that he swears he’s never seen before.

    The exception to that is love.

    Now, the motions themselves are practiced. Fingers tracing against the sensitive parts of skin, lips meeting a partner’s in soft pale moonlight, hands grabbing tight onto hips as ecstasy brings two together to one, but it's the details that stand out.

    The laugh of the lab assistant that rang out into drunk mornings hundreds of years past, the way the traveling con man danced when he knew no one was looking but Ramón , the way the portrait artist gasped in delight when surprised in the right sort of way. They’re a warm kind of memory that, while only existing within detailed notes and lovingly rendered sketches, serves as a reminder why all of this time spent as a monster is worth it.

    Even when the rest of the world feared Frankenstein, all he wanted was a bride, and such a simple want that is. Love is humanity itself, it’s most gorgeous and bright. Even through the haze of decades spent dreaming, it’s that connection that makes the beast human - and it’s what drives him forth.

    In the shadow of the living nightmare, nights spent ebbing in and out of a sort of everlasting delirium, there’s lucidity found in connection. 

    Without connection, all that lies is a sleepwalker. Asleep on his raft, not feeling the current pick up underneath.

    No one really speaks of what waking from torpor feels like. Its hours standing alone in the street not really processing how awake you are, memories and time all becoming a mess to the point you’re constantly second guessing yourself. It’s not fully waking up for a while.

    Did I actually do the thing that I said I would? Did I even say that I would at all?

    What was the person that I met the other day? Was it the other day? The other week? Or was it in the decades of time that existed to only me?

    How did I exist before this?

    …Did I even exist at all?

    Any thought is a flicker of consciousness in an ocean of the indescribable emotion between wakefulness and a dream. Ramón keeps himself alive, he feeds, he researches, he becomes the research , but it never really ever sets in what it all means. What the year is. Where he is. What’s even really happening. 

    He doesn’t know he hadn’t spoken more than to hunt in months until it’s pointed out to him. Socialization is a character, a mask to put on to eat and not get chased out of the village with torches and pitchforks. The village is a city and the pitchfork is a gun, but it matters little.

    As words begin to form, he realizes that talking to vampires is  just tossing and turning until the snooze button is hit. He felt his voice low in his throat but the words blur out into a cloud. Bright flashes of eye color sparkle until melting back into the rest of the rainbow until he falls asleep again. 

    Vampires loathe the sun but the burn is cold water on Ramón’s face, especially as he’s built himself to be resilient against it. It’s a reminder, a walk in the evening light, of what humans are ought to do. It’s a pantomime, but everything is. 

    Time’s current ebbs and flows depending on how much one pays attention to it, picking up speed into a roaring rapid if you close your eyes for too long.

    Sometimes you fall in.

    Bump shoulders and trip into a seance where the veil of mortality is a cold touch on the undead shoulder, and catch the bright twinkle of a fascinated eye and remember.

    Moments become days become weeks and suddenly Ramón’s standing in a city that he’s supposedly lived in for years and it's in a moment that he needs to run across it does he truly, deeply realize he’s even there.

    A moment of true trust and compassion that is supposed to be new yet activates every nerve in a way that feels almost instinctual because for four centuries of research and experience and connection it is. 

    Three years of tossing and turning and for once, in a moment being stared down by a suspicious Sin-Eater full of concern and caution,

In a moment of blind fury and protective rage,

In a night of a quiet whisper and a promise of “I love you”,

 He’s awake. 

    And the water is really refreshing once he knows it’s there.