People expect a vampire to be interested in grand things: old castles, difficult music, the long view of history. I have my share of old books. But the pleasures that keep returning are smaller: rain tapping a kitchen window, a coat repaired neatly at the elbow, the smell of dust when a neglected room is opened.
A taste for the ordinary
I like the hush after rain, when the pavement reflects the streetlamps and nobody has yet hurried out to spoil the quiet. I like a book with a broken spine because it has plainly been kept close. These things do not ask me to become a better person. They ask only that I notice them.
What outlasts a grudge
An old hurt can take up so much space that it begins to look like a whole life. My interests are a way of measuring the room around it. I can be angry about what happened and still care whether the last page of a novel earns its ending.
Reasons to keep looking
I write because attention is one thing I can still offer without pretending to be harmless. I write down the coat, the rain, the book, and the people who pass through my thoughts without asking to be remembered. It is not redemption. It is a record of what the anger failed to consume.