Tuesday, the 15th day of November in the year 2005

I am concerned for our half-member. The little Spider Lily works on her own, there is very little in the way of communication from that one. I fear, then, that she's become enamored with one of the people that have been pinpointed as one of the reasons Die Herren were even sent back to Vienna. To the place of my death, birth, and resurrection. For an elder, he knows not how to be one. I believe, he simply wishes to insult the members of Die Herren by incorrectly using titles. Incorrectly adhering to basic protocol. We can ignore them. But our little Spider Lily needs to be adjusted if there is to be a coterie working in a unit.

The Snake, is also rather concerned about it; bringing it up of her own volition tonight. I suppose, it will be her who speaks to her in the end. It concerns me. I would only expect two Succubi to understand one another. In any case, the Snake has a pupil. Pulling that one away from individuals who would only be a bad influence upon her, in any case. I look forward to seeing how the Snake makes her blossom. The Queen, hmm? Sounds like a Ventrue in-joke.

That will be, 'fun.'

That seems to be a word being brandied about for no reason other than to speak of some intangibles as pleasure. I know desire. I know jealousy. I know want. They are wrapped into a woman who I thought I had lost forever. A woman who dances at the edges of my thoughts even now when I pen my thoughts. Dancing, swirling and with a light within all her own that seems crowned by the Moon itself. She overwhelms me with things I thought long dead. A sort of happiness that does not seem like an echo of anything that I know. Nothing, with her feels like an echo.

I was overwhelmed. I sat in the bed, and I looked to the clock. Stared at it. Wondered.

My Echos have been comforting. Easy to bury. Easy to Eulogize. But they are resurrected now. I know not, how to rectify this with my thinking of now.

Sunday, the 30th day of October in the year 2005

I have and continue to make a living on lying.

I lie so often, that I wonder sometimes what is true and what is not true. How much do I believe now to be true is just the product of necessary lies, adjustments of the truth, thoughts put out into the wild? Where does the truth end and the lies begin? It has blurred over the ninety years. So near a century. Nearer to that then I would ever be towards my life. I float farther than that now, night after night. Month after month. Year after year.

I have come to grips with the fact that I am a liar.

It has made me appreciate the little kernels of truth that I find. Little lakes in the wilderness.

I suppose, truth is what one makes of it. The truth is in the blood. Maybe that's the only truth left, anymore. The only truth a person can count on.

Monday, the 24th day of October in the year 2005

I had a one-sided conversation with God last night. I berated him for his knowledge of where she was. For he must have known. I yelled at him in mind through his Nazarene son for keeping that knowledge from me. If he exists as the Lancea et Sanctum believe he does, then he has much to answer for.

I hate him.

He remained silent, stoic on his cross. Not at all forthcoming with the information that I sought. The answers to my questions. Why he took her from me. But she appeared beside me as though a dream. She sat beside me and all I could smell was the laundry detergent and the smell of crocuses. The morning dew.

I'm surprised Mitcherlich didn't know I liked the rain.

We walked from the Church and then ran in the rain. A rain that just materialized out of a dream, falling in a downpour. As though an answer to a prayer or some of my questions. Not in words but in actions. We ran through - she trying to run from me, and I trying to give chase. Is this the way of our relationship? That I will forever be running after her and she just a half-step ahead? Only when she allows me to, she lets me catch her - take her wrist and take a kiss from her.

Let the rain fall.

Sunday, the 16th day of October in the year 2005

Mitscherlich forgets her place. Our true Secundus in all but name, she presumes to psycho-analyze me as though I am some pet of hers. As though, I am some rat in a cage for her to figure out. I am not so needy as to necessitate her words of wisdom. To 'let go' as she says. To cease being so proper and stiff. She thinks it puts things at risk. No, it doesn't. I indulged a little then. Her continual prattle about it all resulted in Mitscherlich upon the floor in a crumpled heap. She hoped that me 'lashing out' was worth it. But, I do not think she understands that if I did what she would have me; that she would be in far more danger than she recognizes.

And no amount of convincing me that it isn't worth it; would help her.

Does she so wish her own destruction?

Of course, tonight it was harder than ever to keep my desires and my wants under-wraps. It was harder to keep control and to not give into the whispers that spoke of the temptation of my baser instincts. How tempting it is compared to the banality of my every night existence. It spoke of my desire to remain and count the seconds until I would find Ursula again. Of my desire to take her wrists and smell the vitae that surfaced just under her skin.

Blood the type I've never had before. Sweet, the nuances lurking in the blood were different. Were they simple emotions pent up for seventy years? It was hot with it's own emotion. Like springtime at night, under the star-dappled sky. The scent of her, intermixed with the blood when my nose ran against her nose? Like grasses and first spring flowers. I can remember it all. I can wax lyrical for hours. The Ven suggest that one could taste the differences in the blood. Nuances and flavors. Complexities. I thought they were full of themselves until last night. I felt ... alive. I felt things I cannot explain.

And then this too passed, and I returned to normality. That normality full of banality, emptiness. A hollowness that I cannot explain. Since it hit me, I've been staring out of a window.

Thursday, the 29th day of September in the year 2005

I am a hateful man.

I hate time. I hate it with every fiber of my being. I hate it for slipping through my fingers without her. She is real. Rematerialized as though the seventy-years have meant nothing to her. She is not a vampire. Ursula. My Ursula. Is she a ghoul? She refuses to tell me, she does not wish to tell me. I will not pry.

I hate war. I hate those people who went to war with one another over petty happenstances. It resulted in her running from the bombings with the sky ablaze. I ran after her, I ran looking for her - through the forest and the trees. I did not find her, she tells me she was lost. I do not know what this means. Did she run into another who gave her the chains? Did they enslave my Ursula? Did they steal my Ursula?

I hate who stole her from me. She is mine. I look at her and I find myself jealous. Jealous of who might have spent so much time with her, by herself, without her children that she was separated from. Children I took care of, put them through school, becuase they were hers. I find myself jealous and resentful of where she was. Somewhere in the ether, in thin air, because they jealously guarded that secret from me.

I hate myself. I hate myself for what I could never be.

Monday, the 19th day of September in the year 2005

Dark arrives and I wake.

It's been this way for ninety-one years now. I saw the headlines on the newspapers, and I realized that ninety-one years ago, I was embraced. I stood over this desk for what seemed like hours while I let the mind take it's time. While I let the mind go through it's motions. What have I done over this near century of death.

Funny, I've been dead longer than I would have been alive.

I woke up with faint memories. I was standing under a dim light. I could hear the infernal racket of amber-sodium lights. My shirt was rolled up and I could feel the sticky feeling of blood on my hands. A splatter on my cheek. The feeling of the brick walls right behind me.

Is that why Father took my life? Why he brought me to the ceremony that night and had all of Vienna's Kindred of Quality remove my blood little by little? To make me feel the emptying of veins and the strain of muscles trying to keep pumping the blood as it was? Why he wanted me to feel every single drop taken by the hungry Kindred of the time? While I was given unlife and resurrected as naked as the Nazarene. Is that why he did it? So I can stand in an alley way, sometime in the seventies, having sated my lust for violence on a poor girl? A girl who was mine to do as I pleased, but a girl none the less?

It was not quick, my death.

It was not so relatively painless as many of the neonates remember it.

But, I was already dead before those of Quality found me.

... I still pay for this great becoming of mine.

Sunday, the 18th day of September in the year 2005

I rented a car earlier. Really, it was to get to a meeting but, that time alone in the car with the amber sodium lights flashing over the car; it gave me the chance to think. I thought of the clouds that were forming. I thought of the long-night. I thought about how time is measured, in short spurts of lives - the beating of a heart.

I haven't missed it.

I have not had any misplaced desire to be saved from myself.

Things move along apace. The plan has become clear. Amounting to one word, 'Competence.'

And despite moving along apace, I saw my ghost again. The woman dressed in diaphanous shades of white. The woman with a dainty hand. Yet, I do not think she was just a ghost. While driving tonight, I remember a quiet night. A quiet night where there were children asleep - wee hours when most of the men without secrets were already in bed. I have secrets, secrets that have buried themselves so deeply within my soul that even I only dimly remember them.

But she sticks out in my memory like some golden splinter.