Introduction
At certain periods in a warlock's life, he will develop a desire to re-evaluate things: to escape the skin of his old life and grow a new one somewhere else (although you understand I'm not referring to a literal process here, for we warlocks are much more civilised than skin-shedding shapeshifters). These periods of change are generally marked by a need to do something, it doesn't matter what, anything which will break the monotony our immortality seems to have lead us into. They will usually come at significant times in our lives: perhaps our hundredth birthday, or the anniversary of our soul mate's death, or the day after we have fought in a battle. Or even, if you are something like me, it will be brought on by your partner's nineteenth birthday coinciding with your two hundred and fifty third year on earth.
The evening had begun normally. With my nails sufficiently lacquered and my eyes a glittering work of art, I had considered myself ready to celebrate Alec's youth. I oozed vitality and looked every bit as alive as I had on my own nineteenth birthday. In fact, I had looked better.
(Mental note: I really must remember that whenever I feel that things have gone downhill since my own teenage years, the clothes I currently have on my back are so much more exquisite than the plain threads I sported during the 1770's. All I have to do is stare at myself in a mirror and any problems I have should be veritably bitch-slapped into non-existance.)
There was only one fly in the ointment of that night, and it grew from the fact that, two hundred and thirty four years after my own nineteenth and for the first time in my life, I felt old. The feeling niggled me all through dinner, although I didn't recognise it at first, and finally hit after a few too many shots of Fey's Fury in the underground bar Alec chose to go to afterwards. The rest of the night was spent sobbing into my boyfriend's shoulder, trying to tell him through hiccups that he should leave me and find someone his own age. He grew exasperated around 3am, after I'd irreparably damaged his new white coat with eyeliner, and took me home because I was "killing his buzz".
Waking up in the morning on the couch he had relegated me to after I had been unable to stop weeping, I felt as though I had added another fifty or so years onto my life within the one night. It was then, amidst the sickness of a hangover which I have never quite figured out how to remove magically, that I realised I had hit another one of those periods of change. Fighting the urge to attempt to recapture my youth by stealing a vampire's motorcycle and running away with a nixie half my age, I instead opted to shake things up by looking back over my past and writing it all down in an autobiography of sorts, in some sort of grand cathartic gesture.
It was only after I had decided on this course of action that I realised what I was actually doing:
Writing about life instead of actually living it. Much like an elderly man might do.