~Out of the Fire~

Real Vampires

An excellent site about real vampires-- not the mythical kind, not the RPG kind, this is not a fantasy site.

Sanguinarius' Vampire Support site.

Another site for real-life vampires and those interested in them, with boards.

The Coven

The Mother of All Vampire Sites-- if the link is working...

The Dark Side of the Net

AKA the Yahoo of Goth. A General Goth site-- very nice links.

Infoseek

My preferred search engine-- supports extensive booleans.

Lycos

Another search engine that I use.

Projekt

Home of Black Tape for a Blue Girl, etc...

I have been here
waiting for me
under satin moonlight
I have been here
searching for me
under the smell of sea-salt
and mid-May night air.

I have been here
waiting for me
guarded-eyed
shielded by silence.

Come,
quiet night.
I wait
in the velvet arms of sleep.

(Inspired by-- quite literally-- a blue dream: a dream where the only color was blue and the ocean murmurred constantly and I searched for something I couldn't find or remember.)

My name is Tan. I am twenty years old, but I look about 15. My whole life, I have lived in other people's shadows: never quite visible, never quite noticed. I have tried to live a relatively standard and quiet life, and kept my deeper self invisible. However, I have reached a point where I can't deny my nature anymore: I am not and never have been like other people... I am exploring the possibilities of what I may be-- a subspecies, a mutation, a half step away from "normal" humans. I am sure there are plenty like me in this sense-- plenty who feel an otherness to their beings, plenty who have always suspected that they were not quite human in the classical sense, plenty who tend to think of human beings as "them" instead of "us."

Among the procession of names that have come and gone in my search for one by which to call myself, Tan ranks high. I am not sure it will stay there: I don't really know how to capture myself in a name. This has always been my problem. Maybe it will stand: maybe it won't. Time will tell.

I have been called a healer, a changeling, a strange creature, and a vampire. I believe, in a sense, that I am all these things: not the mythical breeds that lurk in the more obscure parts of our psyche, but a less esoteric kind of "other." I believe that perhaps people like myself have inspired legends, but that we are not immortal, nor do we turn to dust in the sunlight, nor do we starve without blood, nor are we the accursed sons of Cain.

As to being a seer and a changeling: these are beyond the reaches of science, for the moment, I believe. I was raised with scientific objectivity: I believe or disbelieve nothing until it is proven (even the spiritual had to be proven to me at one time)... What I believe, I believe because I have had enough evidence in its favor to outweigh that which stands against it.

Understanding comes hard: it comes like thunder, it comes like hurricanes. I have denied my nature so violently and so long that it has become almost impossible to accept it... And yet, slowly, surely, acceptance comes. Maybe I am finally on the road to accepting myself, and to being.
13 June, 1998 AD.

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