~This is My World~

"i skinned my knees on summer sidewalks here
savored the taste of candy cigarettes
and here i learned the smell of agony
and here was pain as bitter as it gets..."

other, "Do You Know What I Know?"

I have come
a long, long way
to get here
and the last thing I will ever do
is walk back home.

I grew up in a small town in Connecticut-- lived in a house in the historical district on a tiny plot of beautiful gardens, up the street from two churches and a pizza shop, down the street from a library and a school... The very kind of neighborhood which the nation believes to be idyllic. Instead, it was a place of torture, of riducule, of rape and anguish.

When I was thirteen, I was stalked, repeatedly raped, and torturted by a man who, when we met, claimed he wanted to be my "friend." He delivered me into the hands of a cult with whom I never hope to meet again. The phyiscal scars will never fade, and there are times I doubt the emotional wounds will ever heal enough even to scar. Of the "adults" in my life, those who saw the bruises and other wounds never bothered to ask me how I got them, and those who observed the emotional effects-- my even-more-withdrawn demeanor, constant fatigue, inability to remember long stretches of time, violently slipping grades-- failed to pay any attention to the signs of abuse.

Then again, my entire childhood was comprised of neglect and abuse, and nobody noticed that, either.

When I was eighteen, my father died, I graduated from highschool and from the magnet school that saved my life, and I moved to Syracuse to live with a man who promised to love me forever... Though in the early months of our relationship he was a raging drunk and committed acts against me that some would consider unforgivable, I live with and love him still. We are not lovers: I allow nobody to touch me. I have come to believe that it is safer to remain apart from the sexual world, since it is yet to be proven to me that a person can touch me without raping me. Sometimes I think it's something about me that brings this on. I am never sure.

He was the first who combined his observations about the coldness of my body, my photosensitivy, my nocturnal wakeness, my emotional distance from other humans, and called me a vampire. For the longest time, I shrugged this off as coincidence: perhaps I had traits, perhaps I was one of the people who inspired the mythos, perhaps this, perhaps that, anything but consider the things he didn't know about me in combination with thsoe he did... I like the taste of blood, it comforts me, it soothes the subtle hunger that wanders beneath the layers of consciousness. It energizes me. I could not reconcile myself with the vampires of legend: hunters, killers, murderers... I would not kill a human being. Granted, I grew up a hunter: I believe that even standard humans, as omnivores, have a predatory side to their nature. I see nothing wrong in hunting deer and other prey animals, so long as you use what you kill. Our environment is so overtaxed with them as it is, due to our generalized expungance of predatory species, and I feel it less cruel to kill quickly and use the meat than to allow slow starvation and the weakening of the herds. However, I could not picture myself as one of those, a vampire, a stalker of innocent human victims... So I shoved the idea into the back of my mind, hid from it, avoided it.

Some night, some time ago, I wandered into a site for real vampires purely by coincidence (perhaps by destiny, I'm never sure which). If ever you have experienced coming home when you have never been there before (crazy though it may sound), you understand what I felt at that moment. I'd felt it before and been correct, when I discovered other intrinsic truths of my nature: now here I was, home, among vampires.

I am not a killer.
I am not a stalker of innocent human victims, an immortal, an accursed son of Cain, an Undead, a walking dead, a living dead... I am as alive and mortal as any of us. I am simply different. The word vampire fits, no other does: thus, I shall use it from herein. I am many other things as well: a musician, a boy, a berdache, a pack-rat, a nest-builder, an emotional wreck, a magnet to other emotional wrecks... Those which hurt will heal, those which bless will continue to bless. I lead a spiritually-driven life: when I question something, I ask the Divine, and that which is the Divine (who/what I prefer not to use any names for, it is not my place) helps me find my paths in gentle ways. This is the path I have been given: I intend to walk it well. I intend to walk it in peace and in blessed darkness, in joy and in brilliant beauty.

"Sometimes,
when the moon is rising,
that sweet, sweet feeling comes.
Sometimes,
it is so surprising...
That feeling
deep through my bones..."

--other, "Darkness"


Oh, for those summer afternoons again, my dear companion!



You are number to cross my threshhold...

Are you out there, Northeast kinsmen, in the city of my discontent?


Tan

ashenslave@aol.com
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I live in and would like to meet those in Syracuse, NY
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