Dear Diary,

I am making progress. This is a fact, just as it always is, and I write now to remind myself of this fact, to ground myself. I am making progress. Things are unfolding as they should, no matter how my unbeating heart claims otherwise. No matter how hungry I am.

I'll… get to the point. I tried to go to the local BDSM dungeon today. I tried to flirt, to entice someone, to softly reveal my nature to them, to hunt. When I entered, I brimmed with confidence. When I left, I had been banned.

That is to say, I'm… learning, and there are other options. I have enough control over my charisma now to expose the subpar quality of my flirting, so I suppose that is something. Something which leaves me concerned, regarding Dana and Natalie and whether my interactions with them have been as neutral as I've hoped. I'd like to believe Natalie truly considers me sweet and wants an outlet, and that Dana and I simply bonded naturally over our frustration with Mary's conduct towards them, but I would also have liked to believe that I would have no trouble charming people at a BDSM dungeon, and yet I am banned, and I can only understand the decision.

It was an embarrassment. Put on the spot to explain the experience of enthrallment, to tell a leather-clad submissive what I would do to her, I froze. I could not discuss my own past, surely, as that would be too forward. I could not summon the sort of passion Natalie manages when describing this, as the words died before leaving my tongue. I certainly could not talk to her as I talk to my thralls while they are my thralls. I could offer little more than an escalating repetition of ‘very’ before the word ‘good’. And when she wasn't charmed, I…

Well, I didn’t truly feel rejected. I simply felt pathetic. There was no connection… Were I the recipient of such advances, I would’ve rejected me too. And then the owner found out I was present and took decisive action, and that was quite frustrating, but it is hard not to see the rationale there, too. Perhaps such rationale would not have existed had I not been clearly making one of the patrons uncomfortable.

I hadn’t thought myself so incompetent… I think I have been ‘off the market’ for too long, so to speak. How long has it been, now, since Cheryl passed? Twenty years? It’s all been a blur since then… though she died in 2015. Ten years, then. Ten cold, listless, blurry years without him.

Before I was turned there was at least practicality in being closed off. I was regularly resisting the call of the most powerful seductive force known to science, just as I was resisting the way I have long felt about Linda, the way I have long suspected she feels about me. Even now, it may provide some benefit in reigning in the bloodlust, though clearly not enough. But it also means that the last time I actually flirted with anyone must be decades ago by now.

It's ironic, I suppose. Cheryl and I were such advocates of free love, and she encouraged me so enthusiastically to see other people as much as he did, but now, even with my very life depending on it, even with the taste for exclusive love so fundamentally wrenched from my body, I still struggle. If only I had let her help me back then. Such a hopeless romantic, even now…

I won't go hungry tonight, at least. I shudder to think of how poorly this whole process would have gone were it not for Mary's thralls… she’s such a good girl, giving me this grace period, surrendering her things. Her… not hers, I… You understand. The point is, it doesn’t feel so bad to be rejected when tonight I have…

Ah, well, I actually convinced her to release Jessica and Helen, so I suppose I will not have them. I haven’t heard anything from them yet… She has been so very arrogant since what happened with Caitlyn, what is continuing to happen, but after how brutally she conquered the two of them, I can't imagine it has been the same. I’m sure she’s written much of it in her own diary, now that I finally have her logging her thoughts that she may see them for what they are, though in this case I doubt said thoughts are supremely interesting. The point is, I have finally freed them, so all that remains is to simply wait for them to come to me, so I can… er… fail to impress them, too…

Well, that would be fine. I am happy for their freedom either way. I am satisfied with that. I am hungry, but that freedom takes precedence. I don't need to taste Jessica's burning, fierce O+, or Helen's utterly delicious A+ tenderness, and I certainly don't need to fetishize their blood even now. My only regret is that I was unable to parlay Mary's arrogance into the release of all her thralls. Then I would have… no one to drink from, tonight…

It's fine. I realize I'm saying that a lot, but it's true. Opening up to companionship once more isn’t so great a challenge as to be impossible. It certainly never was for Cheryl. I can tap what connections I have now, for one thing, both figuratively and… figuratively. In the long run, I am certain my process will prevail. It already has, even. I just need time, and of course, confidence.

It occurs to me that both Natalie and Dana saw me in moments of confidence, in one way or another. Decisive, firm moments in which I could only tolerate a sole outcome. Mary, too, is writing a diary because of that confidence. My only failures come in moments where fear creates for me a stupefying corset.

It always comes back to this strange dynamic between fear and restraint. I must seek to maintain my restraint despite my body's insistent gnawing, but that cannot be conflated with this reflexive hiding of my soul's light. Or darkness, or whatever. The point is, it has been too easy to hide from these parts of myself this past decade, and this vampire business just so happens to have shoved those exact parts to the raw forefront of my priorities. The lust, the love, the need.

It is inevitable now, and if I am honest, quite exciting. I will have a cadre of delicious humans who will love me, humans strange and familiar, who I will show in turn the full extent of the love which I have always been capable of. I will take that space willingly, without cause for grief or remorse. Perhaps I will even find reason to shrug off a bit of the cynical weight which has accumulated on my back over the years… Even the most seemingly ordinary of humans have found ways to surprise me of late.

It is as Cheryl always loved to say: True beauty lives in all creatures. If I can just get through this little rough patch, I have no doubt I will go on to make her proud.

Sincerely,

Luminita