Second chances

"Carl?"

"Yes, dear?"

"Have you ever considered what your life might have been like if you'd never met me?"

"No.  Have you?"

"Um, yes.  For just a brief second or two.  Then it sinks in how completely different it would have been, and I have to think about something else for a while."

"Completely different in a good way, or a bad way?"  Instinctually I felt that her honest answer would be to say in a good way, but I was hopeful that she would prove me wrong.

"Mmhmm."

"That wasn't really an answer, dear.  Would your life have been better or worse had we never met?"

"It isn't really a cut and dried answer, Carl.  Some aspects might have been better, and others worse.  It's like the scales of Truth and Justice.  There is always something that gets sacrificed for the greater good."

I could feel my ears burning as my face became red with anger and was grateful that my back was to her at the moment.  If I didn't get that rage under control quickly, in a flash she would see a side of me that none had lived to talk about.

"And you feel that your life was sacrificed for something bad?"

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"Not exactly.  It's just that being immortal can be a little sad at times.  All of the people I once knew are moving on in time.  Aging.  Some more beautifully than others, some less gracefully.  I miss them terribly, but because I haven't aged since that night we met, I had to stop visiting them after the first ten years went by.  There are times when I feel very lonely.  Melancholy is a difficult song to dance to alone."

I knew where this was coming from.  This yearning for companionship, and the struggle to choose between taking a life and granting immortality.  I'd felt it too once.

My daughter always said she doesn't get mad, she gets even.  She might not have been my biological daughter before that night, but she was after it.  This was her way of telling me she resented me for not being given the opportunity to choose.

"Then might I suggest something by Bach, or Mozart?"

I heard her dress whisper as she spun on her heels to leave the room, taking care not to slam the door for she knew that would anger me, but close it firmly enough that I knew when she reached her own room upstairs that door would be slammed.

What was done, was done.  There was nothing I could do about it now.  Even if folklore was true that the only way to be released was to destroy the maker, it would take a much stronger vampire than her to do it.

I've joined in with Words for Wednesdays, and this month the words have been provided by Mimi on her blog [here].