Who Are You Becoming?

Who Are You Becoming?

17th Day of July, 2026

I have spent centuries listening to humans tell stories about monsters.

According to nearly every tale, creatures like me represent humanity’s darkest instincts. We drink blood. We stalk the night. We are predators by nature, and whatever humanity fears most eventually finds its way into our legends. It is a convenient arrangement. As long as evil has fangs, people rarely have to look in the mirror.

This week, a man was killed during an immigration enforcement operation not far from where I live. The circumstances surrounding his death are still being investigated, and I have lived too long to mistake the first reports of any tragedy for the whole truth.

What has disturbed me most, however, has not been the uncertainty surrounding what happened.

It has been the certainty with which so many people responded.

I found myself reading through the comments, and with each passing one I felt less disturbed by the tragedy itself than by the celebration surrounding it. There were jokes. There was mockery. There was satisfaction. Strangers who knew nothing about the man beyond a headline confidently explained why he deserved whatever had happened to him. Others laughed as though another human life had become little more than another point scored for their side.

I have watched empires rise and fall. I have lived through wars that consumed continents and persecutions that erased entire families. Every age believes its divisions are unprecedented, yet they rarely are. What changes is not the pattern but the vocabulary. Fear always learns a new language. Contempt always finds a new target. The names change. The hunger does not.

Humans have spent centuries fearing creatures like me. They imagined that the greatest monster was the one that thirsted for blood.

I have begun to wonder why they fear us more than they fear themselves.

Hatred is harder to recognize than blood. Blood is visible. Hatred rarely arrives wearing a monstrous face. More often it disguises itself as certainty. It whispers that compassion is weakness, that mercy belongs only to those who have earned it, and that another person’s suffering somehow proves our own righteousness. Once those ideas take root, cruelty no longer feels cruel. It feels justified.

That has always frightened me far more than hunger.

My own hunger has limits. It quiets when it is fed. Hatred does not seem to possess that same restraint. It grows by feeding upon itself until entire communities forget what compassion sounds like. They become fluent in contempt without ever noticing they have learned a new language.

Perhaps that is why I could not stop thinking about the comments tonight. Not because they were unusually cruel, but because they were so ordinary. The people writing them will likely go to work tomorrow, kiss someone they love, help a neighbor carry groceries, and think of themselves as decent people. That is the terrifying thing about hatred. It rarely asks us to become villains overnight. It simply invites us to enjoy another person’s suffering one small moment at a time until we forget there was ever a version of ourselves that would have looked away in sorrow instead of leaning in with amusement.

I have watched humanity at its very worst. I have also watched it at its very best. I have seen strangers risk everything to save one another. I have seen people shelter the hunted, feed the starving, and stand between violence and the vulnerable. The same heart that is capable of astonishing cruelty is capable of astonishing compassion.

That is why this matters.

Every cruel joke. Every dismissive comment. Every moment we celebrate another person’s suffering is a quiet answer to a question few of us ever think to ask.

Who am I becoming?

Immortality has taught me many things. None has stayed with me more stubbornly than this: civilizations are not remembered only for the wars they fought or the leaders they crowned. In the end, they are remembered for how they loved.

Tonight, as I close this journal, I find myself asking the same question I have carried through every century.

Who are you becoming?

-Z