However, if we didn’t already know this wasn’t a memoir, present tense will make it feel even less memoiry—experimental memoirs/creative nonfiction notwithstanding. After ruminating on this while listening to glorious new punk bands who sound like old punk bands—Neighborhood Brats and Uzi—I have decided present-tense works, furthering the living-i n-multiple-worlds theme; for you, fiction and truth are one, the past and present are one. They always have been one.

You’ve succeeded in bifurcating my perceptions. Reading this—and thinking deeply about it—has calved my head in two. Into two at least.

More story thoughts.

With the appearance of the blue parasite monster thingy, we have a pattern in … jackets? I know the jackets are fashion representations of who you and I were/are, etc. Given the chest-sitter has your face, or your resemblance, it’s less a parasite than an externalized part of you/us—fine, I’ll include myself, here—doing the life-sucking, life-eating. That the creature not only has a face like yours but lip-syncs your thoughts, makes it a part of you. An uncontrollable part. Or maybe you can control it but choose not to. You chose not to enter your mother’s bedroom, and there was no thought of interfering or attempting to interfere on her behalf. This choice aspect is the scary part from the vampire’s POV, isn’t it? The vampire(s) here are not the inhuman equivalent of a wasp—or in this case a kind of life-force/spirit tapeworm—with solely the prospect of starvation/death being capable of frightening them. That’s not what you’re writing about here. You’re attempting to make me and the original M. Brown, and now you, more empathetic by grappling with choice. Beyond the curse of having to live, if not forever, then for a fuckload of time, and what that might do to our minds, how do we justify our living off others? Your vampire must lie to herself about being a good friend—or in your case, being a good son—but still having to subsist off the loved one’s, um, subsistence. Why is it always someone closest to us, someone we love? Why can’t we choose someone else? Can we choose? Is our having no choice a lie, or the lie? When you believe you have no choice, it frees you from personal/societal responsibilities. Our choosing to have no choice ultimately makes us vampires more human. Or something like that.