Good evening.
My name is not Xeret, but presently it will have to serve. Welcome to my journal.

I live in a major North American city. As I write this introduction, it is mid-September, 1998, and it is already getting cooler here. As I walked home tonight, leaves were beginning to fall in the wan glow of the streetlights.

When I was young, I was fascinated with stories of the supernatural, building petalled homes for the fairies in my garden. Even then, I was a 'different' child, preferring the cool evenings to the sweltering southern sun. My mother blamed it on my father's genes, as summer burned on and my skin crackled, blistered after mere moments in the inescapable sunlight. The heat and light made me dizzy, sick - my vision blurred to white and my head pounded, blinding me.

Of course, there were tests. They told my mother I'd grow out of it. She found me hiding under the bushes, one day, sundazed; I didn't know where or who I was and my pupils had swallowed every millimeter of grey iris. After that, she let me stay inside more often; no more "go out and play, dear."

Blood has fascinated me forever. I can remember being caught, at five, stealing needles from my mother's sewing basket, pricking my fingertips and staring, hypnotized, at the shimmering red rush. Throughout my childhood I found excuses, found tools: a kitchen knife, an enact blade, staples, needles, anything. My friends would fall off the jungle gym and cry, smeary-eyed and sniffling, over their scraped knees, and, silent, I would watch them, the gorgeous contrast of the thin inexorable trickle.

My dreams were full of red palaces, pale beauties that nursed my fantasies with delicate goblets of blood. Even in my dreams, the taste of it was rich, the first metallic tang giving way to meat and chocolate, a rush of sensation that made my head spin. But these were not nightmares - my nightmares were full of fire, lava, and blindness. I awoke from them screaming, terrified, more often than not.

I got older. In my teens I discovered Goth, and for a while I thought that was an answer - here were others as fascinated with these things as I was. I found friends to play with, lovers of both sexes who would let me cut them, let me taste them. It is an intimacy which has, for me, no parallel. If they wanted sex, fine, certainly I could accommodate that, but it has never been particularly pleasurable or memorable for me; merely an afterthought, a reward, a thank you note. Feeling their hands on me, I tried to ignore the little voice in my head: These people are not like you, not really, they only tolerate your perversities because it makes them feel exotic and dangerous, because you'll let them stroke your white skin, stare into your black eyes, afterwards...

Time passed and I felt more apart, more separate from those around me than ever. Trying to find solace - or perhaps merely distraction - I played more and more dangerous games. For a taste of blood, one tiny draught, I would submit to anything, pleading, beaten, whipped, on my knees, sobbing in frustration. Pain's endorphin rush was a momentary distraction, doing nothing but silencing the roar of bloodlust in my head, if only for an instant.

I am sure I was a pretty puzzle to my lovers, delirious, screaming for my reward. No humiliation was too extreme. My depression, my sense of being APART, doubled, tripled daily. My family eventually intervened, and thus began several years of involuntary hospitalization.

Panicked as I was, I was never stupid or trusting enough to tell the doctors what I really needed, merely smart enough to avoid taking their drugs and to learn to tell them what they wanted to hear. Within weeks of winning freedom, I'd be locked up again, twitching and weeping like a junkie. My mother was convinced I was a suicide risk, and she may have been correct, but for reasons she would never have guessed.

Reaching the age of majority, I fled. Several years of heroin followed, a blue blur that subsumed the most acute aching need into its cool silence. I moved around the country, always active in the Goth scene of whatever city I chose, averting my eyes from even the tiniest accidental drop of blood, literally fearing that I would lose control, feeling my muscles, rebelling, tensing, adrenaline and some frightening feral instinct pushing me to look, to jump, to drink.

I stopped, after a while, putting my needles away, beginning to fear, to believe, for the first time in my life, that I actually might be crazy. I was so aware of what the drug did to me, sanding the world's edges down to gentle slopes, that I could sense it, each time, rushing to block my desires. My desires for blood, my desires for contentment, and at the end, my desire to live at all. I stopped, and suddenly the world ran riot around me again, a carnival of heat and darkness and living, pulsing things.

Certainly, those that knew me had called me 'vampire' before, teasing me, rebuking me, but I talked my way around it, saying I was a blood fetishist, ignoring my more baroque physical problems, blaming everything on some accident of genetics. At this point in my life, though, I began to get to know several actual blood fetishists, and realized, again, that I was different from them. They did not spend their waking hours obsessing over blood. Some of them could never conceive of drinking it; they merely wanted to play with it a little...

For them, it was an occasional sexual toy and nothing more. Something to help them get off. For me, it was truly the water of life - without it, I was weak, dizzy, irritable, sick, unable to function or focus. If I didn't drink for a period of days, my attention span dwindled to nothing, I couldn't see in even the dimmest sunlight, I lost my equilibrium, my vocabulary, my wit, and OH! how haggard and sallow I looked in mirrors. With it, I was alert, strong, able to write for 48 hours straight, able to endure physical extremes, and I could look in the glass and call myself beautiful. No nausea, no disorientation, no clumsiness; I was a different person.

After feeding I walk down the street and watch people, watch the look in their eyes as they passed me, some vague uncomfortable feeling there. If I have had no blood, people harass me, pointing at my clothes and my hair and my makeup, as much as the next Goth, but after I have fed they are strangely silent. This delights me, that they'll leave me alone for once, drawing breath to make a remark and feeling it die on their lips, and I wonder if I really look that different to them. I wonder what it is that stops them?

Despite this, I convinced myself it was just compensation for some chemical deficiency, some biological lack of mine. The v-word seemed too silly. From the outside, I am sure, the goth scene looks like the ideal home for a vampire. However, my friends and I laugh at the vampire people - role-playing games and Jenny Jones have stigmatized it; nobody wants to be thought of as a deluded little twit.

A few trusted - trusted only to a clearly defined line - friends now think I am a 'blood fetishist'. This, even, to them, sounds silly or sick or pretentious or any one of a number of things. We are close enough that they let me know it. I could never tell them more; that's why this page has been built under an alias. That's why there are no pictures of me. That's why I am afraid to tell you my name, what city I live in, truly who I am.

"But wait," you're thinking, "when and how did you embrace the term? What made you decide that you could call yourself a vampire?"

I shall tell you. I realized that blood gave me more than physical well-being. It opens gates for me, lets me see and perceive things that I otherwise cannot. My perceptions of the world, then, are a thousand times, a million times, more vivid, more clear, more TRUE. To use a horrible cliché, I do not feel truly alive without it.

What can I do, though? Even though I've done it a few desperate times, I cannot find donors within the scene; word would get out. I will gladly admit that right now I am too emotionally weak, too confused, to throw away my friends, my social status, my job. Mock me if you want; I am only being honest with you, reader.

Meanwhile I grow desperate. I have never met another like me. Out, in the clubs, at night, I peer into the eyes of those around me, praying that somehow I would know, that some sixth sense would tell me - there is Another, there. I realize that I endanger myself, sneaking out to places where nobody knows me, acting like a whore for the people there, letting them think they've seduced me - that attitude, that perception that taking a "freak" home will be a good story to tell one's friends, that they'll probably want to do something "wild and kinky".. this stupidity serves me well.

I am afraid, though. I know that I cannot continue doing this, that I have to find a way to live a saner life. I've kept a journal forever, but it doesn't feel like enough anymore; I am beginning to distrust myself. Last month in a fearful night of alcoholic haze I convinced a friend to let me drink - I felt like a rapist, she was scared and our friendship is fading rapidly. I cannot continue this.

If you are intrigued, please read on. I thank you. I'm finishing this at an hour when even Goths are asleep, and typing in the predawn, I feel like I am the only person in the world. The only vampire in the world.

Why am I putting this on the web?
Is it some pathetic cry for help, for companionship - some acquiescence to the modern victim culture that I loathe?

I'd like to think not, but why delude myself?

I was scornful of the Internet vampire society (...societies? perhaps that's more apt.) for ages. Finally, though, curiosity and desperation overcame me, and I began to read a few lists, lurking quietly there, began to fill out surveys and add myself to update notifiers, peering through jargon and tacky animated gifs, looking for some resonant truths.

Of course, there are idiots, and petty squabbles, but I begin to believe that among all of you there must be someone who will talk me down from the ledge, someone who can show me that this is viable, that I am not losing my mind.

I love the way this makes me feel, the way this makes every instant feel. Loneliness taints that feeling, and I can no longer stand it. Screaming into my private journal - which I considered posting here in its entirety, an undertaking that would be truly frightening; I'm only going to subject you to new entries after all - is no longer enough.

Perhaps, also, I will provide some comfort to someone else who feels as I do. Surely there IS such a person; I can only hope.

This article is presented as part of an ongoing effort to present other views outside of, as well as within, the online vampire community. Those of us who consider ourselves vampiric don't always look at things from the same viewpoint due to our life experiences. As such, the views and opinions contained in this article are entirely those of the author(s), and may not necessarily be shared by SphynxCatVP. The webmaster is not under obligation to update or otherwise keep current the contents of this article. Most importantly, only you can decide for yourself whether this article or any of the author(s) other views are useful or applicable to you - you are responsible for using your own reasoning and judgement, so judge wisely.

Home | Tell a Friend | Privacy Policy | Site Map | Webrings | Dictionary
© July 1999 to present, SphynxCatVP