Claudius
an excerpt

I think that Friedrich Hölderlein said it best when he wrote the last verse of “To The Fates” (the German has been omitted here, because Ibn cannot read my native tongue:

Be welcome then, O world of silence and shades!
Content I shall be even without my lyre
Accompanying me; for once I
Lived like the gods, and no more is needed.

That, indeed, is my plan: to enter “the world of silence and shades” with nothing—to welcome it with open arms. I have lived like a god, and I don’t need any more. This is not a difficult decision for me to make. I only wish that the transition might be made less painful for the Claudians; however tired I am of seeing their faces and hearing their voices, that fact that they accompanied me for such a long time should not go unnoticed. They have not lived as godlike a life as mine; they need more. They deserve respect—and are some of the precious few vampires who deserve it and will get it (and I will be the first to admit that I am one of the ones who got it and doesn’t deserve it).

I need a bit of life before I go….I know that sounds contradictory to my desire to leave life behind, but it makes sense to me. I don’t want to die having forgotten what it was like to enjoy the world, even if I’ve become sick of every place to which I have traveled. There is a difference between hatred and exhaustion….I do not simply hate the world without good reason; I hate it because I am exhausted by everything in it. I have done everything, and there is nothing I have not seen. People are bigoted and selfish, and today’s human society is lying in fragments. The pieces are barely worth picking up today, and I want to step back from all of that for a while.

Let me make myself clear, since I have not yet done so: If I cannot truly die, I will come back. The destruction of my body may not be enough; I have lived so long that what is left after I am drained, beheaded, and burned will more than likely still be “alive,” after a fashion. I am, for all intents and purposes, and by all definitions, immortal. When I say that “I” will die, I mean that my body will die; if my ashes are scattered, I will have been effectively “killed.” The rest cannot be destroyed—not through any method that we (or, thankfully, the humans) have discovered. If my “soul” or my “spirit”—whatever you choose to call it…I do not care—survives (and I am sure that it will) draining, beheading, and burning, I will have to choose another (since, for obvious reasons, I cannot be born again in my own body). That choice will be made when the world has changed enough to prevent my recognition of any part of it. I do not wish to come back unless there is to be a new picture set before my eyes.

Enough of this death and destruction everywhere…it is not helpful to anyone, in the long run. No one who takes his or her own life to escape it is in the wrong.