This evening, I watched the first episode of the sixth series of a show about vampires I used to watch with my first love, curled up together in bed with her hand inside my hand and her spun gold hair tickling my ear as we laughed and laughed at the plot and the dialogue and the acting and just about everything under the mystic falling sun; tonight I watched the first episode of the sixth series of this show: the sixth, you must understand, but the first I’d ever seen without her wrapped around me; and it was beautiful. I’d been drinking a bottle of 8.4% strength cider, so I was the perfect level of drunk, sitting in bed on my own in the violet evening over South-East England, and it was gorgeous. The heroine’s grief over her own lost love was real and palpable, and my heart beat for her, fast and drumlike in the bedroom darkness. Her first flame nearly breaking his back to move on; her best friend clinging to her mother after a summer of denial; her younger brother holed up in some old mansion, light from his video games strobing yellow and blue over his glazed eyeballs: these characters were actually characters this time. No, scratch that: these people were actually people. And it made me think: all people are people. The actors and writers who make this vampire show are people, and no matter how often she and I used to laugh at them, they were and are always just trying to make something true, crashing together colour and sound and particles and pixels into something that would make people giggle or cry or cuddle or kiss, or think or write or talk or screw. Because all people are alive, but they sometimes need reminding. And as sip after sip of sweet sparkling cider slipped down inside me, and as the episode drew to its end, I was reminded. When the screen faded to black, I threw my clothes back on, put the cider bottle in the recycling, and rushed out of the back door. I walked down to the seafront and along under the now-night-black sky and down the beachside path, watching the primal waves breaking against the dark pebbles and the strange stars wheeling across my field of vision, and I felt just like a vampire, the fangs birth gave me sinking into the succulent world and finding only joy to suck in, only everlasting love and joy, the perfect amount of alcohol swirling round my body, and I thought, this is the sort of night I’ll remember when I die; when I’m on my last bed, swaddled in white and surrounded by sons and daughters I don’t yet know, I’ll remember these coloured seafront lights strobing past my drunken eyeline as I power-walk this empty beachside path at age nineteen; I’ll remember writing this poem and mentioning my first love in the third person and not the second for the very first time in writing since we broke up; and I’ll remember getting back in from the cold, hugging my mum and dad and not needing to tell them that I love them because they know, they’ve always known, they’ll always know; and I’ll remember truly understanding, finally, what life is: that it’s colour, and motion, and memory, and a family of people clinging to each other on the face of a blue-white rock spinning for a fraction of a cosmos-moment in the vast swooning circle of time, clung-together people who watch vampire TV and laugh and cry and who’ll all be gone someday, and that’s okay, and everything is okay, everything is okay, everygoddamnthing is okay.