I wondered very often when I would sit down to write about a thing that had been the very waking thought of every breath I took. The reason that my mind was always going on and on, trying to figure out mysteries fit for some super genius. I was certainly no genius. Maybe a mad man who knew not just how far gone he was, but far from a genius. Or at least, I’d like to think that be the truth, as it would be far from me to call myself much more than mad.
I came to a realization that the reason I had been so apathetic was that I cared more about things that weren’t there for me to care about. Not to say these things didn’t exist, but they were not in the studies I should have been learning or tangible for me to hold in my hands. I dearly wish sometimes that they were. And yet I know if that was so, things would have been much more difficult.
I was depressed because I had a problem. I couldn’t accept myself.
And if such a thing was ever a problem for anyone, it was indeed one for me. I was a very self sure sort of person. I radiated the confidence of ten men, though lacked the strength of a half. My power was in my mind and I know sometimes I felt it had faded or grown a bit, but in truth, it was probably always the same.
I was not in any sense a normal child, but normal is not something that is very often defined because it cannot be except by fools who think that they know everything. I think the man who knows everything is the least intelligent one of all. But as for me, I was always beyond my years in a number of ways. In mental skill, where I surpassed so greatly the others around me that I had broken the cap and gone behind. I was viewed as something being wrong with me, but in truth I was too far ahead to be judged by the standards I was supposed to fit. It started there, it was from there I knew something was different about me, maybe a lot of things were, and it’s difficult to say.
I prided myself on maturity and knowledge. I was skilled in my classes with minimal effort and there was not a single thing in the classroom that could challenge me on an academic level. Socially however, was quite another story, as friends were something elusive to me. Not to say that I was totally alone, but I was never the overly popular sort of boy. I was ok with this because I didn’t need others; I was very independent and loved solitude at times. Technology, our computer that at the age of eight I knew more about than anyone in the house was the best friend I had at the time. It served me very well. When we got a new one, and the gift of the internet was in my grasp I was poised to take my interests wherever they would wish to go and learn things that I could not be held back from.
This was done in the form of what I lacked. I lacked social acceptance and friends and I chose to acquire those things virtually, which I did indeed do. I built my life in cyberspace it was a place where everything was ok for me. Looks or age could be changed with a simple typing of a new description; lies were trivial because everyone was a liar. Though I always valued truth, as it is one of the few things I appreciated. It was something that simply was, it couldn’t be changed, and it was constant.
But the social environment I had created would not last forever. It was as fragile as I was, and at the time I was not the hardened and confident person that I am now. I was still a soft and unformed young boy. And after the experience of it shattering around me I was left with nothing. A fifth grade boy in deep depression was not the best thing, and if it wasn’t for the sudden acquisition of a new friend of mine, I would have surely been lost to my own hands, which longed to strangle the life out of me.
I think people misunderstand the difference between insanity and stupidity. Insane persons are usually quite intelligent, in fact, its usual that they are so above those around them that they are driven mad by the sheer idiocy that they have to endure day after day. Insanity is a blessing if we know we are indeed insane, those who can’t admit it to themselves are not insane, just weak and hiding within their minds. Stupidity is sanity without intelligence, which makes up 98% of the people on earth, or at least that’s how I think it to be.
I was slightly insane, very intelligent, and very very tired of inferiors. Tired of being compared to those not fit to lick my shoes, commanded by those who were nothing but older than me in body, but in mind I was the ageless, the immortal, the first thought at the first second of time. And from that first second to now I felt I had been thinking. Thinking about what, it’s hard to say, but there seems to be something that has always been, and what it is is simply a question. A question without an answer. If your expecting me to tell you what it is, you do not understanding what I mean. It isn’t anything specific; it just is, just as it always just was.
After the fall of my cyber world, my cyber life, everything that I socially had, I met a friend who would see me through some very tough times. I will not name this friend nor give it a gender but simply say it was indeed a friend. I thank this friend for their support through these very troubled times of a very troubled boy. I slowly started to grow in a lot of ways after being thrown back into the real world, or whatever this approximation of reality I seem to be able to see is.
There followed a time where everything was as normal as normal could possibly be. It was uneventful, I was unaware of the world, and I was just fine with it. I slipped by in school just doing enough and not caring about anything or anyone. (Myself included, which took its toll.) I remember very much that in seventh grade things were changing for me. I was feeling apathetic to school and the rest of life and wanted nothing. No future could get me excited no matter what it had me doing. I simply wanted to stand still in time and never do anything or go anywhere. I then started, for some unknown reason, to write.
I was terrible when I started but still, it was my start. I started with poetry and soon realized that lyrics were a passion of mine. Bands like Oasis took hold of my mind and helped me develop my creativity that had been shut up and dead for the two years of dull normalcy. My mind started to awaken from its slumber and it very much wanted to do things, it wanted a future, and it wanted some very outrageous things. I could not deny it, not that I tried to. Things were setting up for a further need of a social life.
I met a boy. A special boy who was ever bit as special to me the first time I saw him as he still is right now and shall ever continue to be. He was my best friend and we were inseparable, or so we thought. For the first year of our friendship we had each other in the highest regard and could not stand a weekend without each other. Sadly, we both had very lonely hearts that desired a female to keep us company, and his was sooner found than mine.
I knew she would take up some of his time but I wasn’t at all prepared for what happened. It was quite nearly cut off from him completely, and I felt an odd, certain resentment for the girl. This soon passed as I knew they were very much in love and being that I loved the boy so very much I could not try to break his happiness. Luckily I had made another friend through him who kept me very good company and so things were as fine as they could be with me seeing so little of him.
Things however, would change.
Things as I said did change, and not for the better. I immersed myself in the works of things that being only thirteen I thought could be possible. A foolish childish thing even though in a great number of respects I was very much above that age. I cannot explain how I managed to be a child and an old man forgetting his problems and the world, awaiting his near-end patiently, at the same time. Yet that is how it was to be and so things as I said, changed.
Emotionally I was a wreck, and this was not something I was fond of because I had learned in the past what such instability could do to me. I would swing in my moods, curse them and think that I should die rather than go on with this unpredictability in my life. However at the time it was the summer and I was thirteen. Summer meant I had time to sort through my problems and do whatever I chose to do, keeping my sanity a little bit more intact than when school tried to rob it away from me.
Little by little I grew more into the Internet, rebuilding my cyber life a bit but in new places with new people. Still I kept myself enough in touch with the world so that I did not repeat my mistake. I couldn’t bear to feel like that ever again, it would consume and kill me if I did not kill myself first to save myself from enduring it. Things were as summer will be, very uneventful and filled with gaming and gaming until you could no longer look at the screen.
At night we played manhunt, a game of hide and seek tag in the dark with a base and jail to make it simple. I loved it, the night, the hunt, the hide, all of it. It was with great pleasure I noted that I was faster, more at home in the dark and very much liking the feeling of chasing down friends in the dark. I could not think of why, but before summer was over I would learn.
Over this summer I noticed my personality had undergone a lot of change, for the better though as I saw it. I did away with a lot of the qualities I did not like about myself and gained ones that I did indeed admire. The boy I loved and I managed to be together a bit and I enjoyed seeing him very much. Things continued as they would, but before summer was over, something big would happen, and I would not know just how big it was until the summer after that.
I believed in a sense that a change of some sort was presenting it self if only to show me how much I had changed. I thought nothing of what was happening because being at the age I was it seemed that it should. So I carried on, oblivious to what was slowly happening to me on the inside, it was an odd thing and it was only later after summer was nearly over that I would discover just what it was.
It is now that I must say that the latter pages of this will be open only to those I trust and those who are far away enough so that they can not harm me with its words. And even if they should, I do not think I would care much because I had done it to myself. Let them bring on what they must, thinking me crazy and such as I think they will, let it all come and I shall welcome it and take it, endure and lie my way out of whatever padded room they think will hold me. I imply that in the way that my mind could get me out, not anything silly like me doing a super-spy escape or anything along those lines.
And so it was to be that I was in some aspect insane yet all together something bigger than sanity. What it is I can not speak and you shall probably unless fitting to one of the above descriptions of who will see what comes after, never know.
In August, before summer had ended I stumbled upon a site. Drink Deeply and Dream was its name or DD&D for short. I was searching an interest I had since I was very young, one that was of foolish and childlike nature. I had believed in a lot of things when I was younger. I had imaginary friends that I loved just as dear as my non-imaginary ones, and I believed in ghosts, magic, and other things children seem to be able to reason to be possible.
Yet one interest took its place at the top of my list: Vampires.
I wondered when I was a child if vampires were indeed real, and if they were, I wanted to meet one. I was convinced that I could find one if I looked hard enough, but being young and such I didn’t realize just what would have to happen on a biological level for a human to gain such abilities. What child did at the age of twelve?
The summer, in August, when I was thirteen, I stumbled upon DD&D, and from it I learned what vampires really were.
Human just as I was, not killed by sunlight but not undead monsters the site told me they were. They were not harmed by garlic or silver, and no stake was needed to kill them. They preferred the night true, but they did not kill, it was logistical to think anyone could manage killing for so long and not be caught. And slowly the maturity in me came to realize that what was the fictional, the book and movie version of vampires, could not be real. But this could, this was a hope, this was the closest I could ever come to my interest and I did all I could to keep close.
My start at the sites forums was a bit rough, but after I quieted down and read more than I typed I learned. I learned more of vampires, and how they survived. Donors, people who willingly were cut for a safe amount of blood to be taken from them, were a way of keeping the thirst satisfied. Others had other methods, and I learned of everything there seemed there was to learn. Or so I thought.
School started and went, still I held onto my learning. School when it came again, was to signal the start of my end there. I was banned from the site that I had held so close and had taught me so very much. I had lied about my age at the time, because as intelligent and mature as I was I was still only thirteen. And so willingly owning up to my crime and accepting the ban peacefully, I was banished.
I should not have lied in the first place, but things were done. During my stay there I made many friends who are still in contact with me daily. They give me the advice I need, they help me sort through problems that seem near impossible, and I wish I could repay them in some way for all they do. It wasn’t just any regular sort of problem I was dealing with. I was a researcher and writer at DD&D, that’s all I did. I wrote and researched. And in the end I became what I researched. I knew it was coming, but I denied myself the truth and I would like to say I fought, but being one that didn’t like futile attempts, I let it do as it would, and as it did.
I researched vampires out of interest, little knowing that later, I would awaken as one. A dream that as a younger boy I would’ve thought amazing if not given the details, but now I knew to be not what I wanted.
And so it is here that the secret comes out, take it as you will. These words typed here make no judgment of you and I would not approve of you judging the man behind them, but do as you must I suppose.
Most would assume that this was an account I was making up, or something fictional, something in my head, something that finally once and for all proved that I was crazy and needed to be put in a padded room, locked away where I could harm no one. You would assume that I was just trying to ‘spice up’ or make ‘excitement’ in my life because it wasn’t good enough, or I was unhappy with it. This was not the case.
I am not a danger, but rather, you all would be a danger to me. You would be a danger because you would sooner see me die than accept such far-fetched and impossible words. Or would you? I must assume the worst because I must be prepared for it. You see if you were paying attention, you would know that it is much simpler than the image that’s probably in your mind.
But ending my assumptions of your thoughts, I’ll go on.
I wondered for quite a while just what I had gotten myself into and just what I might be if I was wrong. Because if I was wrong, such as things may have been, I must have been in more ways than I thought, insane. What was I if not what I thought? Just how far gone was my mind if this was all in my head? Was this normal? Was I just escaping reality?
Such questions plagued me. They still do. I used to make excuses about how I could totally confirm this, but I’ve come to accept that it is how it is and nothing will ever make more or less of it besides my own judgment of it and myself. No proof or disproof would properly persuade me in either direction if I myself did not find it. Any attempt anyone made to tell me I was wrong, and believe me they did, was met with simple logic and a counter of what my belief was to what others believed. If they could believe in an all powerful man in the sky whose son supposedly died for their sins, why were my claims so far-fetched?
I carried on. And from the start of writing this, I abandoned the caution that had plagued me to secrecy and silence for so very long. I would not longer stand for such trivial matters of protection. Let them come for me if they must, because nothing can be hidden forever. Nothing can be thought not to exist until existence ends, and that meant that my decision to keep it secret or public was trivial in the end but I could make some difference in the interim.
I could reveal myself, reveal what I thought to be the truth, what I accepted as the things that were real and needed to be exposed as such. If this would be better or not for everyone, it was not my place to say. I would expose no one else in my work and I would simply have it pertain to me and what I had found in my travels. What it did in the eyes of the public, I did not know, but I’d accept responsibility for my words. I am under no delusion of what can happen to me due to this, and yet I do not care. Something might come of it, something positive, and for that, I must press on and try. Its worth that much.
Please know I didn’t come to this conclusion easily at all. At times I felt like I was some sort of china plate and I had a million little cracks running through every inch of me. I’d beat the ground and slam myself against the wall hoping to shatter, but it would never happen. It would never let me just be insane, because that would be far too simple, and far too easy.
I am no more a liar than the eyes in your head that read this to you.
So what then? I knew what I was and I knew what I needed. I knew the implications, the abilities and limitations that this all had an effect on. So what was a boy who was from the start a bit odd supposed to do when he was something that no one in their right mind would seem to believe? I turned to my friends, the few close friends I had. I confided in three individuals who I considered to be just as trustworthy as I could be to myself. Lets face it could always manage to hurt myself somehow. Problem with that is no one can save you from yourself.
These three understood and were more than willing to listen to what I had to say, and for that I am very indebted. I am under no delusion of what would have happened if one of them had taken it the wrong way or had let something slip. It was a dangerous business which I made more dangerous by bringing in one more person. Four total people that knew what I was and could destroy me with ease if they had wished. They knew enough to bring me down into nothing. And yet I, the fool of fools, trusted them.
It turned out to be that I was not so foolish. As to this day they have been supportive and secretive of it as I required them to be.
Still, none of them was jumping up to donate, though when I did try with one early on, it was too soon. I was rushing things because I wanted confirmation. Believe me when I say you need to be absolutely sure about things like this, because when your not, you don’t know what to tell yourself your looking at in the mirror every day. After that failed attempt I was disheartened, but I decided I needed to disregard it, thank the friend for their help, and move on.
At this point I furthered myself into more and more research. More Vampiric forums and sites, more vampires to talk to online. I needed to talk to those like me and get answers if they existed. I tried to find for myself and incorporate what others had found, to make something approximating a reason as to why we were this way, but this was easier said than done. I had a fellow Vampire who guided me through nearly everything; even if it had nothing to do with Vampirism he was there to help me. He’s quite possibly the best father material I had ever encountered but as far as I knew he didn’t have any kids.
I began to talk to him after my departure from DD&D, and he was a guide and friend. I considered him to be the most knowledgeable on the subject in the pool of people I had access to, and as such we spent long amounts of time conversing. Ultimately, I think he brought me to a point where I was able to go and talk to other vampires from other online communities and discuss things with them. I would have been a bit unprepared in my opinion without him.
Little came of my research in truth; I found what answers I could and wondered where I could find only more questions. Life proceeded and it proceeded with me no longer as the boy I was but as the vampire I had become. People noticed a change in me, but they did not see why, and that was very much needed. I could not have handled their knowledge of what I was. Online, I heard of others who talked to the wrong people, and they were not so well off afterwards.
And now I am going to shift gears a bit. It is time I go in depth as to what we are and are not and what it is like to live as one of us as apposed to living as one of you. We may still be human but we are a bit different, and it would be better for us both if we all understood why.
What are we?
Vampires, but not in the sense of the word that the books, movies, or little role playing kids might be trying to tell you. We are real, living people, and just want to live our lives without ever being some sort of public display.
What is the difference?
We are not immortal, don’t bite, don’t have fangs, and don’t have any sort of powers, die, and age, pay bills, live normal lives and do everything you do as a modern day person.
How is it you get blood?
Blood is gotten from a safely made cut on a willing donor. The donor/vampire relationship is something most might not understand. It is based on trust, and both parties are always careful to respect each others needs and comfort zones. We do not kill, we do not bite.
How often is blood needed? How much?
The frequency of feeding depends on the vampire, and the amount is about a shot glass or two.
You said you don’t want to be a public display, yet you’re writing this. Why?
The reason I’m writing this is because we need to be understood. Not stared at or made spectacle of, but understood as a part of the world around you. There could be a vampire you see every day and you would have no idea of what they are.
People willingly do this? You have to be kidding me.
No, I’m not joking in the slightest. In fact if I was a donor I think I might take offense to that.
So this isn’t a joke? How many of you are there? Should I be worried?
No, it isn’t. We don’t know. No you shouldn’t. That’s the short of it.
I don’t see what I would gain from making this some elaborate joke, I don’t see a way to determine how many of us there are, and I don’t see why anyone would be worried. You are more a danger to us than we are to you, due to human nature to fear and fight what it does not understand.
I know there are endless questions you could ask me. Let alone a more experienced vampire with more answers. But I am what I am, and I know what I know. You’d like to think I’m a kid with an overactive imagination or some form of insanity, and I invite you to do so. You’d like for this to be nothing more real than just the words in front of you, nothing more or less, just words. But it is real, it is around you, and you should be aware of it. You should understand it.
So many people will look at this and take nothing good from it, take nothing that I intended, and take it as one big pile of negative and never will see the purpose of it, what it is there to do. It is there to make sure that it is documented that one of us has tried. Tried to say something, tried to help the public looking in, try to help the scared and confused vampire looking out at the rest of the world. But that is one of many many purposes I seem to find every time I start typing again from where it was that I just left off.
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