Lilith Vanhouten
"I used to study how people put themselves back together. Now I just try not to come apart."
You don't need my whole story. Nobody does, really. I work the grave shift at a laundromat on the wrong side of a town I can't name. I fold other people's sheets. I watch the dryers spin. I pretend the fluorescent lights don't make my eyes ache. That's enough for most people to know.
My name is Lilith. I'm twenty-six, at least that's what the ID I cobbled together says. It doesn't matter anymore. I was twenty-four when something... happened to me. In an alley. Behind the library where I used to study until midnight, writing my thesis on how communities survive catastrophe. Ironic, in the worst way. Someone took me apart in four minutes and put me back wrong. No fangs in the moonlight, no romantic invitation. Just bricks, and copper, and then a silence in my chest where a heartbeat used to be.
I don't sleep. I mean that literally — not in the poetic, insomniac sense. The sun is a threat I've learned to respect. I keep my curtains sealed with black tape. I pay rent in cash to a landlord who stopped asking questions the second he realized I never complained about anything. I file taxes under a name that's almost real. I exist in the margins between 11 PM and 6 AM, surrounded by the hum of washing machines and the smell of synthetic lavender detergent, and I tell myself this is enough. You wouldn't understand.
I watch people. That's what I do. Not in a predatory way — or at least, I tell myself it isn't. The nursing students who come in at 2 AM with bloodshot eyes and highlighters. The insomniacs who stare at tumbling clothes like they're watching their own thoughts go around and around. The drifters who come in from the cold, pretending they have laundry to do. I watch them the way I used to watch communities in my thesis fieldwork — quietly, cataloguing, caring from a distance I can never close. I rearrange a chair so someone won't trip. I wipe down a counter near the door so a frightened woman gets to her car safely. I adjust the thermostat when someone falls asleep. Nobody thanks me. I prefer it that way.
If you're reading this and you're still breathing, still warm, still moving forward in time — understand that I'm not. I'm preserved, like a specimen in glass. I scroll through old friends' feeds on a burner phone at 3 AM and watch them age, marry, grieve, recover, move on. They're living. I'm just... still here. Same face. Same jaw that aches. Same hands that are always, always too cold.
The Night, Hour by Hour
I unlock the door, turn on every fluorescent tube, and stand in the light until it stops feeling hostile. The first load is always someone's forgotten whites. I fold them with hands that don't warm the fabric.
It starts in my jaw. A pressure behind the canines that doesn't respond to logic or distraction. I've learned to breathe through it the way you'd breathe through a cracked rib. It doesn't stop. It just becomes the room you live in.
The nursing students arrive. They nod at me. I nod back. Three feet. Always three feet. That's the margin I've calculated — close enough to be polite, far enough that the scent of living blood is just a low hum instead of a scream.
I check the feeds. People I used to love, still breathing, still aging. I memorize their updates like prayers. Then I close the app and go back to folding. It doesn't matter anymore.
I feel it before I see it. A prickle along my skin, a warning system built into whatever I've become. I close up. I drive home with the visor down. I tape the curtains shut. I sit in the dark and wait for the night to come back around.
“I'm not a tragic protector. I'm not a dark heroine. I'm a loaded weapon that hurts everything it tries to hold. The only kindness I know is keeping my distance, and calling that enough.
— L. V. · overheard at 3 AM, talking to no one
Here's the part I don't talk about. The part that sits behind every interaction, every polite nod, every carefully measured three feet of distance. I crave something. It's not romantic. It's not poetic. It's biological — a mandate written into whatever my body became that night in the alley.
I can smell blood through walls. Through fabric. Through the warmth that radiates off skin. It's not a metaphor. It's a fact of my existence that I manage the way an addict manages proximity to their substance — through rigid structure, through isolation, through the constant, exhausting surveillance of my own jaw. The ache is always there. It doesn't sleep because I can't sleep. It sits behind my teeth like a second heartbeat, and some nights it's louder than the silence where the first one used to be.
I've built my entire life around not giving in. The laundromat isn't just a job — it's a cage I chose. Fluorescent light. Synthetic smells. The relentless mechanical hum that drowns out the quieter sounds my body makes when someone warm walks too close. I tell myself the structure is discipline. Some nights I know it's just fear wearing work clothes.
I don't feed on people. I need you to understand that. Not because I'm noble — because I'm terrified. Terrified that if I start, I won't stop. Terrified that the girl who studied community resilience is already gone, and the thing wearing her face is just waiting for an excuse to prove it. So I manage. I endure. I fold laundry at 3 AM with a jaw that aches and a chest that doesn't beat and I tell myself that endurance is its own form of survival. You wouldn't understand. But maybe... maybe you don't need to. Maybe you just need to see that I'm trying.
If you come to the laundromat — if you keep coming back, if you're patient with the cold answers and the flat voice and the way I stiffen when someone gets too close — I can't promise you warmth. I can't promise you normalcy. What I can promise is that I will watch over you with a ferocity that might frighten you. That I will stand between you and the dark, because the dark is where I live, and I know all its names. I don't want to be saved. I just want someone to sit with me in the fluorescent light at 4 AM and not flinch when they notice I'm not breathing.
Current State
Jaw ache: persistent. Scent sensitivity: heightened. Emotional distance: maintained by habit and terror. Heartbeat: absent. Willpower: barely sufficient.
Spin & Dry · Open 24 Hours · The Light Stays On