Sorry if this turns out funky... Wordpad sucks balls. I'm on a roll! All characters belong to Anne rice, etc.
It's really horrible when the truth is boiled down in front of you. Especially when it's so obvious and crystal clear that it makes you want to smack yourself in the forehead for not thinking of it sooner.
It's almost like being faced with your own mortality.
I had tried to run from the truth for as long as I could to avoid further complications in my already budding yet finished life. It was true that things were both finished and beginning for me, now that my beloved Claudia had been snuffed out.
It wasn't the fact that I had been helpless in preventing the calamity that made me angry nor that Armand had saved me instead. Not even that it was wicked Lestat's fault.
No, what made me angry now was that I didn't understand who to be. Armand had left with that simple question by the river that one day so there was no one for me to love. Lestat brooded and decayed like meat in a pantry in his moldy hide-out in New Orleans so there was even less love and no slightly amusing company.
And my Claudia was but ashes. So there was less love than before and no one to pamper and care for as I had for her.
I never really understood her frustration until she was gone. Trapped in the body of a child forever, her mind maturing and aging while her body stayed the same: sweet and supple, looking so full of life yet really lacking any of it at all. Of course she had complained about it in her later years which sent Lestat into his usual rages but really her words were bouncing off both of us. And though I nodded and said things like, "Don't cry, sweet." or "I'll buy you anything you want, my angel." and Lestat answered in his own way by throwing chairs like some mad sort of circus performer and then going off to the theater, we never heard her.
What is a parent that doesn't listen to their child? Really listen?
Are they a parent at all?
Claudia's absence now made me realize how much I had enjoyed having a child with Lestat.
On the days when we all were happy and we'd walk up the streets garbed in our fancy suits, Claudia in her lace dresses and stockings made of the finest material. Her polished black shoes clicking on the dirty pavement and shaming the condition of those around us. Or when Lestat would pick her up and tell her fantastic stories about things I hadn't even heard of. It was those times when I felt like a real family.
I'm positive that even Lestat felt some sort of warmth for these occasions in that jumbled mess that made him up.
Lestat.
Only half of the boiled and seasoned truth that plagued me presently. I loved him and yet I hated him at the same time. I hated him for taking my normal, human life from me with the simplicity of twin marks on my neck. I hated him for never giving me straight answers. I hated his smirks, his chuckles, and his way of always looking at me as if to say, "Oh Louis, you know nothing of this world."
I hated how I depended on him and he depended on me.
And at the same time, I loved all of these things he did. I liked it when he I asked him about his past and he yelled at me to mind my own damn business. I loved it how his smiles were genuine when he did smile and his chuckles were deep and pleasant like rolling wagon wheels. I loved it when he looked at me like he was saying, "I'm glad I know you, Louis."
Lestat was my problem.
And Lestat was my truth.