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It’s hard, with people like Lestat, to blame them for how they are. I think really and truly that he couldn’t change who he turned out to be even if he went to church and made himself abject to somebody’s god or society’s rules of engagement.
Lestat’s brain just don’t work like that.
I think of Paul, my brother—I have experience with people whose brains don’t work like other folks. It’s not Paul’s fault that his death was… premeditated… nor that he heard from those birds every day until he died (may he rest in heaven, Lord if you exist, he was innocent). It was nobody’s fault at all. Just like I can’t even blame Lestat’s upbringing for how many colors of fucked up he is, and all the things he has done.
This is not an apologetic record trying to paint my Lestat in a positive light. He was never a perfect man, and he isn’t a faultless vampire, but he’s mine. Nor am I writing any of this because I’m sharing him with any of you who may read this after we’re gone. This is for me— to see the beast as well as the man, and to have something to return to in order that I might reflect on him without too many liberties taken with what my friend Daniel calls “the odyssey of recollection.”
Since I’ve got all eternity, apparently, to love Lestat and fight him and hate him and want him, I’m trying to do something that will be mature and healthy for the both of us, since couple’s therapy is a suggestion he would laugh hysterically at. That is, if there were a therapist who could legally and practically handle hearing about our centuries-long battles and surrenders and all their many mistakes and grisly details, which most mortals would not have known how to live through for the sheer magnitude of the mental scarring they would have accrued.
Lestat is not perfect, but neither am I. I caused him much pain at several points in our relationship, which now I look back to with a grimace.
But mostly, Lestat is sensitive. It’s what I fell in love with—his drama and constant attunement to his audience (which has included me for 115 years now), and his way of seeing what his extreme vanity would have you think he overlooked. Delicate as a turntable’s needle, is his finger on the pulse of desire and tragedy. It’s how he could profess his love to me and make me feel seen and safe and adored… something that most of my human life, until him, I’d never experienced. It’s how he can show up after years of us pretending to hate the other, that he can have me falling in love all over again, questioning why I ever let him go when everything I thought I hated was all I needed from him.
Anyway. It’s September 2025. We’re back together, and we live in Seattle, on the water so we can hear the boats go by every night when it’s time to wake up.
He’s driving me insane.