Shadow of my Soul. Elias, Hell, and Me, #7

This volume begins with a vibration. Not loud, not spectacular, just a small phone display in the year 2002, a new message, a "kiss" made of only a few characters that shifts an entire life. In my earlier volumes, I was always searching: for demons in hell, for distraction, for validation, for anything that might fill the emptiness inside me. In Miami, I felt for the first time what love can be like when it rolls over you like a wave and carries everything away.
But with Elias, something else begins. Something deeper. Longer-lasting. More vulnerable. Volume 7 tells the story of a vampire who, for the first time, soothed the devil inside me. It is a love story that begins over the course of two months like a rush and slowly turns into an everyday life that holds me up and overwhelms me at the same time. It is no longer only about nights in clubs, kisses in the dark, or sex in places where you were only ever meant to pass through.
It is about text messages, about sentences like "I love you" and "You are my darling, " about every tiny moment in which I feel: someone sees me. Completely. Everything you read in this volume-every message, every timestamp, every small detail-appeared exactly that way on my display or in my diaries. Nothing was invented to make it more dramatic. My heart handles the exaggeration all by itself. I wrote these lines down back then without knowing that one day I would share them with the world.
Maybe that is exactly why they are so honest. In this volume, Elias is not just "the vampire from Era." He is the man I loved most deeply at that time in my life. Through him, I learn how beautiful it feels when someone thinks of you every morning, even if he is chronically late getting up. I learn how much a single "Good morning, my darling" in a text can change the whole day. And I learn how brutal it feels when trust starts to crack even though the love is still there.
Standing between all these messages is John. He is my mirror, my anchor, my quiet chronicler. With him, I talk through every text, every pause between them, every missing word. He asks the questions I so often run from myself: Why do I believe the ex more readily than the man who texts me "I love you" every day? Why do I fight myself so fiercely when I finally have what I searched for over so many years?Volume 7 is no fairy tale with a glittering happy ending.
It is a record of love from a time when every text message still cost money, when phones had buttons, and when a single "kiss" on a display could be louder than any declaration of love spoken in real life. It is the story of two men falling in love in hell while one of them is far too often fighting his own shadows. In these chapters, you will find a great deal of closeness: nights in a narrow bed, conversations at two in the morning, shared plans for vacations, rings, and a "we" that feels bigger than anything that came before.
But you will also see the cracks: jealousy, old wounds, mistrust that does not come from the present, but from a life that came before it. I am writing these lines many years later, with different eyes. Back then, I was in the middle of it. Today, from the outside, I can see it clearly: Elias was my great love. Not perfect, not easy, but real. In every text, every scene, every argument, every reconciliation, there is a young man experiencing for the first time what it means to be seen unconditionally, while at the same time being terrified of losing exactly that.
If you read this book, you are allowed to smile when I once again react with far too much drama to a short message. You are allowed to tremble with me when I stare at my display in the evening, afraid he will not text again. You are allowed to cry with me when words are missing even though the love is there. And perhaps, in all of it, you may recognize a piece of your own first great love.