Would You Rather?

In some ways, it feels like an eternity since I have turned. In other ways, it feels like only yesterday. Has it only been fifty-odd years since that eerie night around the campfire? I suppose I should start at the beginning. Maybe then you can begin to understand life from my point of view; the point of view of a young vampire. However, I wonder where to start: before I turned or after? I guess I begin with what I know. To know one is to understand the other, I suppose; my human existence compared to the vampire life. This begins the story told from the point of view of a vampire. Here is where it starts.

I remember that cold night in mid-October when we were hanging out around the fire, swapping stories, and having fun. Lively songs around the beat-up used guitar turn to sad songs and eventually, those dumb dad jokes filled the air with high-pitched laughter. A lull in the late hour and someone finally asks me, “Would you rather be a ghost, a vampire, or a werewolf?” Did I mention that I usually say what comes to my mind first? “A Vampire! I want that lightning-fast speed like what they have.” It came out of my upturned mouth before I had a moment of thought. That is the way it has always been. I never think before I speak.

My eyes were glazed over as I thought about the question and my answer. I have always enjoyed a decent game called Would You Rather. You give me two options (in this case 3) and I give you the reasons for the one I would rather do. It is a harmless game after all. I do not remember much after that. Sparks shoot across the path as feet crunch upon loose twigs and crunchy leaves. I should have been a bit more thoughtful in answering that question. If I only knew then what I know now, I would have answered more safely. Not pausing before I speak has always been my downfall. For a moment I wonder if my answer should have been different. I slowly come out of my reverie. Not that it would have mattered much in the moments that ensued after.

As I mentioned before, I do not remember how it happened. Campfire scenes of smoke and spark, mixed in with the confusion of laughter, screams, and running, I stumbled over a log. At least I hoped it was anyway. In the chaos, hands made of steel grabbed me from behind and I felt something, or someone, bite me. Quickly, and then it was gone. Naturally, I reached upward toward my neck where fingertips met blood. Confusion turned deep as I spun around midair. There was no one there. Wait! That does not make any sense. What if it were an animal? Or much scarier, a monster? My mind tried to keep up with all the mayhem.

It is a lost cause. My brain could not comprehend the scene orchestrated before me that night. My mind could not understand everything that seemed to be happening in the chaos. As I say this, I find it hard to explain how it started to dawn on me then, even in the chaos, of what was happening. I was turning, or transitioning into that dreaded monster that I so flippantly stated I wanted to be. How? Who did this? I do not know.  

Regardless of the how and the who, does it matter much how it all began? It is all semantics anyway. Initially, after I turned, it was brutal figuring out how to work through the guilty feelings. I found it hard to work through the slaughtering of an innocent just so that I could survive. The killing is the worst for me. From the point of view of a vampire (because, you know, I am one!), the hardest part of being a vampire is the killing and the shedding of innocent blood. Second to the killing is seeing the looks on the innocent’s face. From my point of view, I see shock, horror, and pain.

 A lot of the same things I see in their eyes are the same things I felt in the beginning, even if I did not die. I felt the shock and the horror of what I had become. Oh, yes! I also had a lot of self-loathing. I do not know if those thoughts will ever get better and subside. For this reason, I regret the human inside me who was so flippant and frivolous in playing a game of Would You Rather so many years ago.

However, even after a mere 50 years, when eternity is stretched out before you, eventually, you begin to trade, little by little, that self-loathing and destructiveness for other things. For instance, you might ask how I can so easily kill to survive when I loathed what I had become. That is an easy thing to answer. The guilt is easier to handle if you think you are doing a service to society. 

You might wonder what that means when I talk about doing my societal duty. This intricate plan hatched one evening while hiking through a forest and its deer-made path. They did not hear me approach. Maybe it was due to the arguing; the female yelling at the man to quit and he yelling obscenities back. Or was it the light-footedness I have grown accustomed to over the last half a century? Anyway, I did for her what I thought I needed to do. I did what I felt someone should have done for me that night so many years ago. So, you see, I trade the guilt for responsibility; or at least my version of responsibility.

And so here we are, guilt giving way to a commitment, or rather a duty to protect those who could not ordinarily do it for themselves. If I were to be honest though, those lines of protection, duty, and responsibility have blurred so much that I wonder if my self-made morals are really on the high ground like I had pretended back then. From my point of view, I wonder if my moral compass had disappeared along with my humanness. I fear that I will always be the monster I believe I am. But alas, it is only an eternity after all is it not? It is only the perspective of a vampire after all.