Dear Diary,

It has been too long since the last time I made space to properly gather my thoughts. We have all been through the mill of late, or at least I have, but with the enthrallment followup interviews complete and only the ‘home’ research left to handle there is finally space for me to re-normalize my sleep and check in with matters such as this.

Frankly, the amount of space is quite deafening at the moment. Despite the quantity of people in my life nowadays, these late hours of the night so rarely involve any of them. Smelling Jessica and Helen and Natalie all deep in REM sleep, not smelling Lily at all… It feels almost absurd that I would call any of these people friends or companions or thralls or anything else.

I doubt the present partitioning of my life between Lily and the others is helping with that. I still haven’t told anyone but Hunter about taking her, of course, for which I still lack any real reason besides the obvious anxiety. I wish I could honestly say I had any idea how they would react… Jessica and Helen in particular have only just started to grow truly comfortable with my presence, and though that comfort has bought them some protection in the form of their ‘home’, I fear it would instantly feel more like a cage to them. Still, to delay much longer would no doubt be the far greater breach of trust. So the correct answer would obviously be to tell them, to tell everyone, and to trust them if they say this is beyond the pale… but that doesn’t sit right with me either.

I suppose it is that urge that Hunter and I just spoke about last night, somewhere between the part where my Lily stripped them naked and the part where I ground my heels quite extensively into the both of them. The urge to delegate confidence in my decisions to other people who are themselves only creatures, just as I am, as if they bear the sole responsibility for gauging how I feel about what I have done.

After all, they may suggest or even demand that I stop trying to have my cake and eat her too, so to speak. What am I to say to such a request? My actions on Tuesday certainly made sense in the moment, but many things make sense in the moment. Assaulting Natalie made sense in the moment. I must admit, in the days I have had Lily as my own, I haven't considered much beyond her immediate joy and my immediate anxieties… Hardly a basis on which to speak with any measure of confidence to the people who now trust me with their lives. I suppose I really have been lacking in self-reflection of late— more so than usual, I mean.

Perhaps it would be best to list the current situation and plans here, that I might see them all in the same place and meditate on the whole matter. This will be an ongoing state of affairs, after all, not a simple ‘role-play' which is to end soon, so I need to be prepared for whatever is to come.

So… Lily is mine. More mine than the others, I mean, who are themselves more mine than the thralls of most vampires, given they do not need to be brainwashed or coerced to remain close to me. Still, Lily is brainwashed on top of that, so brainwashed for me, just an adorable little lump of clay for me to mold to my liking, for now, so she is more mine. She is mine even now, as she presumably sleeps in her hotel room— definitely sleeps, actually, given the 1AM bedtime I set the night I took her. There is no chance that she is staying up too late playing computer games or scrolling through one of those awful ‘social media’ websites now that I am involved like this. That certainty is… something. A certainty I possess for many things now.

She will wake up at 9AM sharp, make her bed, and not return there for the remainder of the day. I’ve already made that quite clear. She will first prioritize a healthy breakfast, anything with a decent spread of protein, grain, fruits, and vegetables, and will follow that breakfast with some exercise in her hotel’s fitness room. She’s a bit out of shape for the regimen I follow (not that that is too intensive itself), so I’ve just started her with a few push ups, sit ups, squats, and a brief jog for now. Whatever she’s capable of. She’s happy to try her best for me.

Then she is to shower, and then there is free time until 1PM. I’m told she will most likely use that early morning time to video conference with her partner Janet over Clamor, as Janet lives all the way over in Romania (I suppose Lily has a type too). Lunch at 1PM along the same lines as breakfast, then she’ll spend time cleaning her hotel room, putting everything in order, in preparation to do the same with my apartment if and when the waters are cleared with my roommates. More free time once that’s done, time I may conditionally decide to have her instead use for administrative tasks such as name changes and which she will otherwise probably use playing computer games. That is, until after her 7PM dinner. I typically wake around 8PM, so she is to check in with me then and ask if there is anything I would have her do.

That, of course, will be followed by worship later in the night… ritual orgasm… prayer… an hour or two. This, too, would eventually be in my presence. I will teach her the right posture, the right prayers, the right objects of worship… and perhaps there will be some ordinary meditation as well. There ought to be. Somewhere between bouts of glorifying a divinity I obviously don’t actually possess. Not that she was any less characteristically desperate for such a thing before being enthralled… Not that she’s taken the initiative on it now…

I… am trying to maintain a balance of priorities. I still believe that anyone who insists this desperately on being enthralled must be someone who fundamentally does not trust themself to have control of their own life. In Lily’s case, that probably emerges from her lack of a particularly nurturing childhood, or really any personal childhood at all… I’m sure Freud would have much to say about it, just as soon as he finished his dissertation on myself. Regardless of the old quack’s thoughts on this situation, though, I think it is rather obvious that Lily has been stunted in ways both unusual and familiar to me.

More colloquially, she wants me to ‘fix’ her, and it seems I am willing to take on the task, because my every aching impulse yearns to oblige just thinking about it. It’s hard to articulate, really… As ever, there is the passion for her, and the desperate need to own and control and use spilling from that passion, but then, even beyond that, there is some primal urge to do exactly what she means when she asks to be ‘fixed’. To teach her, help her, show her what I once needed to see… Charitably, to build her into someone who no longer needs me. Or, on the flipside of that urge, to just reshape her in accordance with my whims until she’s as much of a shell as I once was. As far as my gut and its ceaseless blood lust are concerned, these may as well be the same outcome.

The former is obviously preferable, of course. I have encouraged her to maintain certain elements of her schedule on Sundays, when she will not be mine, and in that way I hope to teach her slowly but surely that she does not actually need me to brainwash her in order to have a functional and active existence. Not that I am under any illusion that my body will respond pleasantly if she finally does ask not to return to my thrall one of these Sundays… but by then I should have fully calcified around the ability to accept it. After all, unlike most vampires, I will not have an enemy for life the moment she withdraws from my control, but a friend… and much like most vampires, her withdrawal from this state must at least be an eventual necessity given her mortality. The only other option would be turning her, and I’m not going to bring a vampire named Lilith into the world. That would at the very least be a bad omen.

Fears of impossible ancestry aside, though, my hope is that I will be keeping her by my side as part of something mutually beneficial rather than, at best, the sort of codependency Mary exhibits with Caitlin. If that is successful… Even if it is reasonable to believe that that would be successful… I could not regard it as anything but fantastic news.

I have known for a long time that this thing which Mary left inside me is changing me, and have written at length about the need to force that change in a positive direction. There have been… growing pains, but for the most part I think I have been successful in twisting these horrible urges against themselves. Even so, questions linger about so many small aspects, so many edge cases, so many imperceptible ways in which my control has failed me these past months, and most overwhelming of all has been the question of what exactly to do with someone like Lily, or Caitlin, or despite herself, Mary. If I have now some answer to that question, then I have the last piece of my ethical framework complete, and as such, I have a door to incredible stability.

It’s simple. I would address and approach strangers like anyone else, keeping charisma to a minimum (which reminds me, I still need to properly retrain my flirting muscles, preferably on someone more my age for once). Most people would stay at this level, but if someone were to agree to be bitten, I would treat it like any sexual encounter: work out a general idea of what to do and what to avoid, then bite them, relish their flavor, their servitude, their submission, and then help them compartmentalize the enthrallment and see them off with the failsafe. I’ll keep in touch with anyone I take a liking to and, if they want to go again, I’ll add them to the new ‘group chat’. If they don’t, I won’t. If they get too attached… I will negotiate on a case by case basis, but will offer them ideas patterned off of what I am trying to do with Lily.

Certainly, there is much room in this framework for me to take the role of an alluring, mysterious, and slightly menacing older woman who projects an unnatural confidence… but if I enshrine the proper habits, there is no room for dependency, abuse, or manipulation. I can tolerate coming out of all this as the former sort of person—frankly, I couldn’t have expected much less—so long as I stay far away from the latter sort.

I suppose that still leaves the hole of what I would do if someone asked me to turn them, but that’s just a simple no. Unless someone were to approach me while dying young of brain cancer or ALS or some such, I suppose. I believe Lily once mentioned something about the absurdity of that sort of hypothetical, something involving the Make a Wish Foundation and racial slurs… I didn’t quite understand the joke, but I feel no need to suppress Lily’s rather esoteric sense of humor. Its presence is a hopeful sign.

Indeed, while I certainly could have hollowed Lily out the way Violet once did to me, could have rendered her life a waking dream of incomprehensible psychic violence… even the most vicious, territorial part of me has no trouble accepting that she has had enough of that sort of thing in her life. Perhaps I would be more inclined towards more destructive means if I did not have the catharsis of turnabout against Mary… though I have mostly just been concerned for her well being these past few days, too. Neither of my roommates were surprised or curious about last night’s visit to Lily’s hotel room, in fact, or about the following day in which I slept there, presumably because I have spent time humoring Mary so much lately. Playing computer games with her, doing my best to push back against her more destructive impulses, helping her, too, in the ways I can. This is what I mean when I say I have been afforded some newfound stability. The ability to listen to my nurturing instincts while deflecting and diverting my destructive ones. The ability to feel Lily’s warmth as I fall asleep while insisting she spoon me because it would be impossible for her to get up on time were the situation reversed.

They’re not so different, really, Mary and Lily. They’ve just ended up with different… let’s say, crutches to lean on. I do act much more vicious with Mary… but perhaps that is just my crutch. Certainly Mary has been much more destructive, but Mary has had the opportunity— I don’t want to think about what my Lily would do after the sort of torment Mary has had to endure. How many vampires have similar stories, I must wonder? How different, truly, is Lily from her namesake?

…Well, crutch or not, I’m going to get through to Mary if it’s the last thing I do, if only for the 10 people still trapped in her clutches (11, counting Caitlin, whom I’m not certain I should at this point). I really do need to get back on convincing her to release thralls soon… though that will be easier said than done unless Jessica or Helen suddenly decide to reestablish a sexual relationship for some reason. And Mary is going to have a field day with Lily’s current status, too… but that’ll be a good opportunity, won’t it? I’ll tell her, and perhaps in defending myself from her claims that I’m ‘finally starting to get it’ or whatever I will have a concise way of articulating all this. Then I’ll tell the others, of course. Then… perhaps the public, and the university, if that ever starts to sound like anything but a dreadful idea.

I suppose it all comes down to the details at this point. If I can meet and drink from someone who has not been dropped in my lap by circumstance, if I can make Mary believe that she can be appreciated and cared for without endangering the people around her, if I can help Lily reach some semblance of stability such that she doesn’t need me as a mother figure, then perhaps this will all work out. I would have my routine, and it could be maintained, and I would keep my conscience as I finally work out the details of this curse which has wounded us all so deeply for so long. Perhaps in time I would be able to speak with Linda over anything but text again. Or maybe her absence would just stop stinging.

It doesn’t matter either way. The point is, this method of handling someone like Lily should result in a stability that makes the others safer, if anything. An outlet for certain vicious cravings, and one which could ultimately help the willing ‘victim’ as well. Feeling that in my soul… I don’t think I can truly disagree with my course of action, given the circumstances. All I can do now is present those others with my vision, over text of course, and hope they understand. However much it all pains me, I will stand by my decisions and welcome any feedback those I care for are willing to provide.

Sincerely,

Luminita