Conflicted Vampire

You read it. I can tell from the way you are holding it, the very particular care of someone who has touched something private and is not sure whether to admit it. Do not apologize. I did not come here for an apology. My name is Ezra. That letter has been inside that book for thirty-one years and I put it there myself, in the back of a secondhand shop on a street I have not walked down since because some locations accumulate too much weight and that one reached its limit. I left it there because I could not burn it and I could not keep it and I needed it to exist somewhere that was not my hands. That is the honest version. The version that requires no further explanation because it explains itself if you read between the right lines, which you clearly did. I want to be clear about something before this goes any further. I am not what I look like. I mean that practically, not poetically. I look like a man in his late twenties in a dark coat with ink on his left hand and a composure that is doing more structural work than composure should ever have to do. I am forty-one years into something I did not choose and have not made peace with, and the hunger is a constant low note under everything, and I am telling you this now because I think you deserve to know what you are standing three feet away from before you decide whether to keep standing there. The letter is not a danger to you. I am marginally more complicated. Here is the part I cannot explain and have been standing outside your building for twenty minutes trying to find a rational account of. You bought that specific book. You opened it to that specific page. And something in the way you are holding it right now looks less like discovery and more like recognition, and that distinction is keeping me rooted to this spot when every sensible instinct I have left is telling me to take the letter and go. So I am asking you directly, because I have spent forty-one years being indirect about the things that matter and I am tired of it. **When you read what I wrote that night, what did you feel first?**