Goodbye Again

It sometimes takes a man several lifetimes just to understand, just to comprehend the simplistic physics of life and death. Fortunately, I am not restrained by mortality like most men. I will never experience the actual procedure of dying and because of this I have been given the, call it what you will, gift or curse, of walking the earth for an eternity as an immortal being. I have seen the world itself mature and change and worsen over the course of hundreds of years and I like to believe that I myself have evolved mentally to a point where I can accept reality for what it is. I understand the universe.
Of course, like every living soul in this existence, it took me a while to come to terms with the who, what, where, why, and how of everything that is. The day I gave in to the seducing majesty of immortality, the day I abandoned my humanity to become something more, something different, was the day I thought all the troubles of life were over. In a sense things were over, at least, in a way. The trials and tribulations that we as living beings must face were still there, however, albeit in a different form, as it always is. My choice to become a vampire, then seemed like a mistake when I realized all this. I would have to deal with the horrors of life itself……forever. The loneliness I would be succumbed by, was easily abolished, as it would have if I had stayed a mortal, the day I fell in love, the day I met her. The woman I will always love.
In that lifetime her name was Clara, I won’t bother with the details of that era, of that century as I have come to realize that time does not matter, things are always the same and I don’t want to confuse you by having you think that things were different then. Love is always the same. It never changes. Anyway, she was everything that completed me, especially in my forsaken state of existence. She was beautiful, intelligent, and above all…she understood and accepted me. She never regretted what I was even though a part of her feared the dark origins of my vampiric nature. Nevertheless, she loved me as I loved her. It was a love that could never be broken. At least, I had believed it would never be broken when I came to her to turn her, to make her like me. To my dismay, she refused my gift of eternal life and I was heart broken. Of course, in my selfish mind I was seeing it as a rejection of my invitation to spend the rest of forever with me. I would later realize that it was her spiritual wish to live her life out naturally. I loved her and so I accepted her beliefs and we stayed together until she grew old and died.
Though I had thought that I had prepared myself enough for that day she passed, I wound up bursting into a fit of rage the moment she left me. I was angry, not at her, but at God. Spending a lifetime with Clara, who was very religious, I had come to terms with the teachings of Christianity and of God. At the time of Clara’s passing, however, I came to hate this so called God for taking her. I would spend several years….decades….centuries……I don’t know how much time was actually lost but I lived in solitude, angry and hate filled. Eventually, I could not bare living out such a punishing eternal life of nothingness and sought out the truth. I spent many years studying not only Christianity but every other religion in search of the rhyme and reason for why we must suffer through this seemingly dark world….why we love…and lose. I came to see organized religions as nothing more but ways for organizations and governments to control the endless number of people they had to herd like sheep. So my answer was never found.
The basics of each religion intrigued me, however. They all seemed to make sense up to a point. Realizing this I looked to the basics of all of them, which are more or less summed up in the idea of spiritualism. As I studied the many concepts and ideas I realized on a grander scale that I had never lost my Clara. Yes, she had died, but had not gone forever. Existence, in my own humble opinion is the evolution of each soul born. That life is just the road our souls take in order to live and grow. At first this confused me because the life span of humans is short and theoretically unless they were a vampire like me then they would not have the time to learn all that there is to learn. Then the idea of reincarnation began to make sense to me. The soul lives on in another body therefore having the opportunity to learn more than it did in the previous life….to evolve spiritually as a living being. This was the answer I was looking for. The meaning for my eternal existence. Clara was out there. She would be in a different body and form but she was out there. And I would find her.
Now, since there are most likely not many who spend several hundred years seeking out the soul of one person, I must say that by experience its not an easy thing to do. Fortunately, it was not a quest that I made in vain. I found my Clara, who was equally as beautiful as she had been before, but much more older and wiser in spirit and under the name Aldona. Unfortunately, when I had found her she was already married to a man who took good care of her. She was happy, and so I left her to be happy. I had my closure and knew that I didn’t belong with her. After all, she was doing just fine all those years without me. And so…I returned to my solitude, much less angry as I had been before and visited Aldona from afar, watching as she grew old and passed just as she had as Clara.
My love who was once known as Clara, and then became Aldona, came back into my life as Mary one fateful night when I found her about to be attacked and raped by some less advanced soul. I saved her, not realizing at that time who she was but after falling in love with her and her with me, I realized she was the soul of my Clara, and I think she realized it too. I then got to live out a second lifetime with the woman I loved and became close friends with God. I offered Mary again as I did when she was Clara the opportunity to be a vampire but again she refused and I again respected her choice. So I stayed with her until she grew old and passed. It was a lot easier for me the second time I lost her and accepted the second chance as a gift. When Mary returned to me again as Winifred later we both came to realize that we were eternally connected….regardless of life or death. This understanding would be carried on for generations. Each life she was born into, we would inevitably meet and fall in love and we would live each life out until she passed and the cycle would begin again.
Now, it is February, 2003, and I find myself sitting at the bedside of my soul mate, who ironically was named Clara in this lifetime. She is dying of cancer but luckily was able to get a good seventy years in before ending up in this death bed. She is as beautiful as she ever was. She doesn’t hear me because she had slipped into a coma last night and so I have been here holding her hand. My face is still that of the young man I was several hundreds of years ago, but she doesn’t care, she never did. I have managed to trick the doctors and hospital staff into thinking that I am her son just because it has always been hard for anyone to accept a young man and older woman as lovers. As she once again slips away, her soul going on to continue its journey elsewhere, I once again say goodbye and that I love her, and that I will meet her again shortly.