Life Sucks

The bookends to Winter are drab and dismal. The branding of Spring lifted it to a position of renewal and positivity. The poster boys, lambs disco dancing in green and pleasant fields. But that is the end of Spring with the promising warmth of Summer already on the horizon and underwriting the proceedings.

Equally, the vast majority of autumn is miserable, grey and wet. Seldom are there crisp mornings decorated with banks of artfully crafted leaves of every hue of brown barring the awful beiges sported by geography teachers. Nor the alarming colours of shit that make it necessary to book an appointment with the doctor. 

Winter reigns for most of the year, it holds sway over its brother and sister and Summer is but an interlude of fun and frivolity. It’s the cloying damp and mud that really drags everything down to a depressive state. There is no redeeming quality in these things. But then I ceased dreaming of redemption a very long time ago.

Within the confines of these grey times is the season of the witch. Halloween calls and all the goths unfurl and strut around with barely concealed excitement. I’ve never really understood this. There’s one day in the midst of several hundred days, where these people can dress up as themselves. They don’t make an effort. They don’t do anything differently other than look around at the world and poke a finger at it. I don’t think they get that Halloween makes them superficially normal and that this should be anathema for them.

People are a bundle of contradictions. I see this all around me. I’m surrounded by it. It smothers and stifles me. And here’s the kicker. The contrary nature of people shapes me. 

You wouldn’t think that would you?

I’m a powerful creature of the night and I prey upon people. But then, you are what you eat, and so I’m as much a victim as anyone.

Thankfully, I’m not an idiot. Not quite. 

But I do have to trick, glamour and cajole in order to get what I need.

No, it won’t hurt at all.

I have to fib in order to bring my companions along on the journey with me. 

It doesn’t always hurt. That really depends upon the person concerned, but let’s face it, we’re talking about sharp pointy teeth puncturing skin. That can often cause pain receptors to spark up in a dire warning. If you don’t want it to hurt then the conditions have to be just so. You’re going to have to really want it, and want it in a way that works for you. If you trust me, then we’re good. 

Yes, I just said that. Trust a vampire. And why not? In some respects, I’m more trustworthy that a lot of common or garden people. I have less to lose for a kick off. I’m far less invested, and my needs are simple. Really very simple. Sadly, boringly and depressingly simple. I need blood, peace and quiet. Basically to be left alone until I’m hungry and then I’ll have a drink and I’m good.

I sleep in a library. 

I own the library. It’s a mecca for those goth types. It’s called the Midnight Library, because it opens only at night. During the day, I sleep with the books. I like books. They contain worlds and they contain sense. There is hope. There are dreams. They are a reflection of how it could be. A window to how things should have been.

My library only contains fiction because I prefer fiction to the sordid reality that humans seem intent on continually corrupting. Fictional narratives are cleaner and more organised. And after all, I’m a fiction. A walking lie designed to haunt the living and frighten them into doing the right thing and living good lives. 

If I’m honest, I don’t think I’m very good at my job. Not that aspect of it anyway.

Perhaps the world has moved on and I’ve not moved with it. Sometimes, I wish I could get tired. Increasingly tired until I crawled into the ground and slept until the end of days, missing my alarm and cooking in the flames of righteous fire. Burnt into a transformative state that afforded me the opportunity to start all over again.

I don’t get tired though. I just get hungry. Between those hungry urges I’m left to amuse myself. The problem with that is that I only seem to find amusement in the context of my urges. They define everything. Once sated I’m really not bothered with anything at all. Think of it like Christmas Day. Once you’ve eaten your fill of Christmas Dinner, you slump on the sofa, stick a film on and drift in and out of consciousness. Full and beyond any meaningful action. That’s me. I’m a deceptive slob. You really wouldn’t believe it of me.

I should have equated my state to the classic fulfilment of The Big Urge, followed by rolling over and falling asleep. It’s quite like that. And I’m really very old. My appetite is blunted and I’ve seen it all. Been there and done it. Some of it I invented, dear.

I’m telling you all this and I could tell you more. I could paint you a wall of grey so tawdry and energy sapping, the wall itself would be a vampire of your energy. You would fall into a state of unconsciousness that you may never recover from. I really could do that. And sometimes I do. In a way. My way. 

You lot though, you’re a bunch of ignorant bastards and you will not let me be. I can sit there and be the least animate object in the room and yet you still find me fascinating. You describe me as urbane and vulpine and wax lyrical about my appearance and how it speaks of my nature. A nature you are incapable of fathoming. I’m beyond your limited comprehension, and so you romanticise me in a clumsy power play. You seek to control the unknowable, thinking yourselves gods. You’re not even cast in the image of gods. Not in the way you think you are. Silly fools.

Few of you have a clue, but you insist upon foisting your will upon me. No one gets this side of things. No one cares. It’s all so selfishly one way. The romance and fantasy of the vampire. My allure. My power. 

There is an element of truth in this. I do have a certain attraction. But it takes two. You can’t actually have it all your way. You influence me. You make me into something that I once wasn’t. And you lot have been doing it for so long, I cannot remember what I once was.

I think I was like you once. That might be your influence though. That and my desire to conform. To fit in. To find a peace that resides in belonging. 

Some say that I have no soul. That’s hurtful. And would it hurt if I had no soul? I doubt it. My longing to be. My search for a state that would afford me peace. Cut me, do I not bleed? Not for long, granted. I heal and then I get hungrier sooner. I do have a heart. Hence the whole stake thing. And a mind. Hence the beheading strategy to end me. Holy water is a bit of a misnomer and I quite garlic. Comes out of the pores when I’m feeding and gives the blood a more complex flavour.

What I am is bored by my immortal tenure in a world that teems with ignorant and short-lived humanity. My relationships are superficial. No one wants me for myself, it’s all about my vampiric qualities. And people are so superficial. They don’t want to spend their life with me because they don’t think I have a life. I would, if only I had someone to spend it with. The bigotry I’ve been subjected to is astronomical. Never mind a village mob baying at my castle door wielding flaming torches and pitchforks, the wrongheadedness of modernity is sheer poison. There’s no fun to be had these days.

I don’t even have anyone to moan with. No one understands. In the past I joined group therapy, but never could keep the pretence of being human up. I always had to leave before I betrayed my cover and really opened to my truth.

In the last thirty years, my longest romance was six months. She was a homicidal nutter, but charming with it. I fell for her charm. Thought she was a potential kindred spirit. She was a complete psychopath though. A really, really good psychopath. She had me fooled. Mirrored me so effectively I thought she was the one. Barring the cloying enthusiasm for the killing that was. Took me some while to realise that her being fine with not being turned into a vampire was because she really liked the killing. 

Three months in and I started to realise something was off, but she then made a genius move and began mothering me. Mothering a vampire! Oh! She was good! It was like she knew when I was hungry, and there’d she be with a victim. Opening up a wrist here and a throat there. She waited on me hand and foot. And neck for that matter. 

She was a feeder too. I dunno how she managed it, but I began to put on weight. And I was always hungry and I developed a blood belly. I have a sneaking suspicion that she was selecting victims who gorged on fast food. I told you. You lot have an undue influence on me and she somehow knew this and dialled into it. 

I reckon we’d still be together now if she’d not gotten carried away. Thought she had me right where she wanted me. Mistook me for something that is utterly evil. I’m not, and I have standards and values. I won’t even recount what she did. Only that she went too far and that was when I saw her for what she really was.

Good job I never turned her. 

So there you go. I’m a simple creature with even more simple needs. I eat. Then I lay fallow until the urge to eat comes upon me again.

Thinking of Martha the Psychopath has got me thinking about my relationships. I’ve had a great many relationships. All short lived. You could say that I’m a serial monogamist. I meet someone I’m attracted to and I turn on the charm. Then we spend time together. 

If you tracked the orbit of the lady in question it would be ever decreasing. They draw closer and closer and closer and the intensity of our being increases. Neither of us can help it. This is my nature. And it is yours. 

Desire.

Want.

It is all about hunger and the sating of that hunger. 

Each and every relationship is transactional. An exchange. I’m a dark promise and I deliver on that promise. Always.

Ever wanted something so badly you’d give everything to have it? I illicit that desire.

The sex is something else. I’m not going to lie. I’m the best you will ever have. And no, that’s not a trick. I’m not relying on the fact that you won’t be around to have sex after you’ve been with me. I eclipse everything that has gone before.

Want to know why?

You will let yourself go in a way that you never have. You will be in the moment with everything you have and are. I draw you out and lay you bare and then I amplify every pleasure receptor you possess. Your mind being the largest of them all. 

You can take so much more than you give yourself credit for. You can go further and do more. Just when you think you’ve reached your limits? I take you further still. Delirious with pleasure and yearning for more.

I’m ridiculously addictive. Only, I never leave you feeling hollow. Your first time is never the best. It really does keep getting better. I open you up and fine tune you until you are singing and screaming. There is a power to what we do together. It is unique and it is special. And it is worth the price you pay. It has to be, or you wouldn’t be an active and willing participant.

I lure you in with the calm and the grey and ever so slowly I turn the dial. You were down and had little to look forward to. You stumbled upon me and your expectations were low. Then you see something of worth. Something that shines. Something colourful. That’s when the magic begins to happen. And as the magic awakens, there is a heat that dispels the grey. 

My hunger goes way beyond blood. After all, the blood is the life. We all want what we can’t have, don’t we?

There is this peculiar intertwining of sex and death, but what people miss is that you are never so alive as when you are on the ragged edge. It isn’t sex and death at all. It’s sex and life. The heightening of both experiences until every nerve ending is thrumming with the vibrancy of pleasure. 

I live for that.

Or rather, I wish I lived for that.

I can taste it though, and the hotter it is, the tastier it is.

The best part of sex is the fantasy of it. The mechanics of sex are base and simple. The mind is the largest and best of the erogenous zones and that is my playground. I draw my lover further and further away from reality until they are lost in the fantasy I create. They believe that they are lost in me, but I’m nowhere to be seen. I dwell in the shadows, watching, waiting and playing and playing until I’m good and ready to feed.

You lot twist and misconstrue so much. You imbue me with qualities that are your own and never mine. I return the favour tenfold. You confuse love with sex and that undoes you even further.

All those dark kisses over a protracted period. 

My mouth upon your wrist after you have begged and begged me to bite you. The subsequent mind-blowing orgasm. The best you’ve ever had. 

Yearning for me day and night. Pleasuring yourself and thinking of me. Wanting me each and every night, so that when I do appear, you explode with passion again and again. After we have made love again, you ask for that dark kiss, and this time I tease the soft flesh of your thigh with my lips and tongue sending you wild with anticipation, then I penetrate you when you least expect it. Feeding just enough to build your addiction to me.

This is a dance that I choreograph and that I lead. This landscape is mine, and once you are upon it, there is no escape. My fantasy. My power. My control. I take what I want and when I want it and I give nothing in return other than pain and death.

You do the rest.

You do it all.

All that pleasure?

All yours.

Except, at some point, it is all mine. 

You become nothing long before the game ends. 

I’m a hungry void.

I’m a black hole with a gravitational pull that cannot be resisted.

The Urge falls upon me and I fall into the same old patterns. I barely register what is happening and then it is all over and there is nothing left of you. Just a sad, deflated sack of bones.

There is shame in nakedness. 

That is why you wear clothes. You have done so ever since the apple of self-awareness was bitten into and fig leaves covered your embarrassment. In the aftermath of sex, you experience guilt and shame. 

I sense it and I live it vicariously. As much as it is possible for me to live anything. That shame is all the greater for your sensing that what you are doing with me is so very wrong. The crash of your feelings after I feed breaks you a little more until the release of death. That final time, I fancy I take upon myself all of your shame. 

It should overwhelm me, but it doesn’t. I glory in it. I sometimes wonder whether it is your shame that is my prize. 

Are our urges somehow aligned?

I have never figured this out. 

Your relationship with sex is a mess. 

Except maybe Martha’s.

Martha was simple like me. Maybe too simple. Unencumbered by guilt or shame, she was also unencumbered by a conscience. There was nothing redeeming about Martha. She was as lost as it’s possible to be. There was something about that that made me feel better about myself.

Thing is, there are more and more Martha’s in the world these days. Humanity seems to be suffering from a cancer that it is wilfully oblivious to. 

I know though. I can smell it’s rank corruption and in my grey, sated spells I fear what it means for me. I sense the change in me already, and it is deeply unpleasant. I’m becoming more Martha. Losing any semblance of humanity that had lingered. 

No values, no boundaries, and no conscience.

Nothing will be beyond me. I will do as I please and I cannot be stopped. I’m limitless in this respect.

This is wrong. I can feel how badly wrong it is. But that feeling will pass. And when it does, there will be a reckoning. I should never have been here in the first place. Too late for that now. 

The only way to be rid of me is to extinguish my host.

And they’re doing a fair job of that as it is.