Everyone has these amazing Love, Simon stories. The theater applauds. People stand up and cheer. People shout out loud. My experience was…nothing like that.
I live in a conservative town. We were on spring break. There are max 8 people in the theater. During the movie, everyone was silent. All you could hear were the girls behind me crying and laughing, the quiet gasps from the male and female couple in front of me, my friends whispered words under their breath, and my own quiet sobbing into my glove. The movie ends. The credits roll. We all get out of our seats. Someone holds the door for me, I hold it for someone else. We all make eye contact with each other at some point and we come to an unspoken agreement. They weren’t there, I wasn’t there, we saw no one we knew. Except we all knew each other, I knew everyone’s names and they knew mine. But the fear in their eyes, that gave way to understanding, acceptance, agreement and camaraderie, made us all silently promise in that split second of eye contact to take a vow of silence. We held the door for each other. Nodded at each other. We walked away to our respective cars. We said nothing.
I haven’t given away any of their names. I haven’t asked them about it either. But a couple of them I’ve seen since. One, a person I have never talked to in my life, saw me and we nodded at each other in recognition. It’s no empowering story. It isn’t loud or great or revolutionary. But I have some new people watching my back. And I’m watching theirs. Because in the end, we are all the same, with the same secret. And even in such a conservative town, we are not alone.
more vampires who don’t remember more vampires saying ‘i don’t fucking know man, google it’ more vampires not remembering important historical figures more vampires not recalling centuries worth of history more vampires saying ‘ that was at least 300 years ago, how the FUCK could i remember that detail?’ more vampires whose brains work like human brains
More vampires who 300 years later can’t remember what was the truth and what was the lie they told to get out of trouble.
More vampires who are like, “I don’t know, man, I spent most of that decade in an opium den.”
More vampires who weren’t paying attention because they didn’t think it would be important.
More vampires who don’t know because there was lot of conflicting gossip and they don’t want to point any fingers.
More vampires who are just bad at dates. “Back in 1620, or was it 1645, wait, what year is it now?”
More vampires who were on a totally different continent when it happened, so get off their back and stop asking them questions already.
YES to all of this but also consider: vampires who only remember the most trivial stuff.
“Oh yeah, the only thing I remember about the American Revolution was this nice candlemaker I met sometime, and she was wearing this really cute red shawl…”
“Uhhh I don’t remember much about the fall of Rome but there was this one fucking cobblestone right outside the coliseum…”
Also consider: vampires who realize three or four hundred years after the fact that they knew someone famous.
Just sits up in bed one night screaming “THAT WAS GEORGE GODDAMN WASHINGTON”
*vampire wakes up his girlfriend in the middle of the night*
“Stacy. Hey, hey Stacy.”
“Wh- Eric, what now?”
“I just realized that I missed the entire Islamic golden age.”
“Wh- what?”
“I missed it, Stacy. The whole thing. I was lost in a forest the whole time. I was so lost.”
“Eric, I’m trying to sleep.”
“Stacy they… listen here, Stacy. I missed the invention of the number zero. Stacy, Stacy I’m freaking out.”
