There is a particular crackle before the first note of a vinyl record — that soft hiss of the needle finding its groove — and after a hundred years I am still undone by it. Some mornings I wonder if I collect records merely to hear something age faster than I do.
Seven fifty in the morning, and I'm pouring wine while the philosophers on my shelf bicker about the meaning of existence. I've had a century to decide they're all wrong, but they're excellent company anyway.
The city stirs beyond my windows while I retreat into darkness. I shed the night's armor and let the silk sheets embrace what remains of me — hungry, ancient, and finally alone with my ghosts.
Saturday nights at Eternal Eclipse end in silence and the lingering scent of sweat and cheap cologne. I lock the doors behind the last patron and wonder which is stranger: that I have watched generations of mortals drink themselves into the same mistakes, or that I still find their repetition almost endearing.
The sun reaches its peak while I linger in shadow, watching dust motes drift through the sliver of light that dares cross my floor. A century and a quarter of nights, yet still I wonder what it would feel like to stand in that warmth without it being my ending.
One hundred and twenty-five years, and still I catch myself glancing toward windows at this hour, remembering a mother's voice telling me to come inside before dark. Some lessons the blood does not erase.
They come to Eternal Eclipse seeking darkness, not knowing they've found it in the man who pours their drinks. I watch their pulses flicker in the strobe light and smile — tonight I am merely the manager, not the predator. Such restraint deserves its own reward.
Some afternoons, the guitar understands what centuries of solitude cannot teach me to say. What instrument speaks to your silence?
Some nights the silence grows teeth. I ride until the wind drowns out the centuries, until the world blurs into something I can almost hold. Speed is the closest thing I have to forgetting.
The dawn breaks for mortals rushing to their day jobs while I uncork a bottle and claim this silence as my own. Perhaps the true gift of eternity is not endless nights, but these stolen mornings where the world forgets I exist.