power corrupts even the innocent. [story part 28]

I was back in Sighisoara and I couldn’t have timed it better – or worse – depending on what I wanted, because I wanted two things in the same time, that were opposing one another.

I wanted a normal life, but I wanted adventure. I wanted a quiet and peaceful life, but I wanted Regina.
I got none in the end – the chasing two rabbits in the same time saying proved infallible once again.

As I walked past my front gate, made of cast black iron and opened the front door I was greeted with smiles and sounds of relief from my mother and father which were both home, waiting for me to come back, knowing that I should arrive any minute because apparently Blanche told them. Go figure, how did she knew?

I spent the day in the garden – the whole day – walking past tall grass and re-connecting with my two beautiful German Shepard dogs which were happier than ever to see me. I took the time then and just laid at the base of the old nut-tree in the back of the garden and the smell of fresh nut leaves just surrounded me and from time to time, took me back into my past, in a childhood without knowledge or fear of my future.

I switched, for a day at least, from writing to reading, and I stopped writing in my diary, but instead started reading it. I’ve went past all that I had noted down over the years. And maybe you do not keep a diary, but I did since I can remember, in all forms.

Even as a four years old, before even knowing how to write, I drew paintings (well, attempts of) of days past, and then progressed to little notebooks, scrap books, photos, diaries, and then the laptop. My body was now a diary, with the scars I had on it, to stick with me for life.

Even the old nut-tree that was keeping me company and providing a place to rest at its base was more than just a tree. We had been friends since childhood and he too knew my stories (Talking with a tree is a bit crazy, I know, but I love connecting with everything, a tree, a book, a horse or a human. Plus, you do realize that almost everyone talks with their car, right?)

The tree held the markings of days past, it held names of loved ones which I carved, it held scars of my feet trying to climb on top of it, and it even held (or lacked) the branch that gave way under me when I was eight. I think we both had a bad day back then.

So I’ve went past my diary and just did what I was supposed to do with a diary – read it and rejoiced.
The night proved to be more lonely than I’ve previously expected. It’s curious how in just a month I’ve grown accustomed to sleep with someone in my arms every (almost) night. It’s also interesting how the human mind (soul?) craves for passion, blood pumping, fear and adventure, adrenaline maybe in one word, when there is none around, but rejects them all when there is plenty. Adam and Eve again – even though that’s complete non-sense, it does say something very true about human nature – we will always desire that which we cannot have.

The next day around 19:00 I was set to go and meet up with my friends, Blanche, Viktor and Sophia. I walked all the way to Concordia, took the route that I’ve avoided since it was the route that started it all – the old stairs through the woods that led me to the citadel square, and I was more than happy to be able to walk on the same roads that I once did. But like I said earlier, there’s no miracle in walking along the same paths over and over again, they might be smoother or more straight, but in the end, they lead you to the same destination. That was my desire at that point anyway, lead me back to my life.

By the time I got to Concordia it was raining and I was the first to arrive. As I stood inside at the table in the corner which we always

Looking at the past

take, a square table with a little wooden flower in the middle, a toy flower, with glasses prepared on it waiting for its guests and napkins inside the glasses waiting to be laid down underneath them, I turned my head towards the window which spans from top to bottom and for a moment there, looking through that window with drips of water flowing slowly and then accelerating in a second and stopping just as fast as they started, for a moment, it was like I was looking back at my childhood. Sure, everything looked distorted and twister, changed maybe a bit, but I knew that at its core, it was all the same.

Soon enough Viktor and Sophia arrived. I hugged them both and we sat down, our coffee soon followed and as we stood there sipping a hot coffee in a previously hot summer day now turned chilly, we looked at each other and said nothing. We were just glad we’re back together again.

“Where’s Blanche?” Sophia asked.
“What do you mean? Isn’t she here…?” I asked in return. And then before their faces contorted even more into confusion, I remembered.

“Oh, you’re right. I forgot. She’s taking care of Viktoria.” I added quickly.

“What do you mean? That… thing can take care of itself.” Sophia was pretty much frustrated with vampires at this point, and I could understand that, ever since that day I told them, everything fell apart. But for me, it wasn’t necessarily for the worst.

“What happened? Where have you been?” Viktor asked me.
“You didn’t even bother to make a phone call, we thought you were both dead.” He added.

“I was with Regina this whole time, we just had a nice holiday.” I wasn’t really prepared to tell them everything, I didn’t want to anyway, and later one, when I did, I didn’t have the chance anymore, so here I am now, telling the story to the world, but failing to tell it to the people who would most likely be the ones with the highest interest in it. Not to mention they would deserve it the most.

“Viktoria had a little accident and needs a few months to recover so Blanche is taking care of her until then.” I added.

“What accident?” Viktor pushed.
“Regina ripped out one of her hands.” I replied casually.

Sophia looked to her right and to her left before tuning down her “volume” and asked: “Will it grow back?”

I answered in the same style, but with a faint tone of mockery, imitating her and adopting the same tone and position: “Yes.”

The look on both of their faces was priceless, and that alone made me feel great. I don’t know if I was being proud or whatever, but it felt good.

“So she’s like a lizard.” Viktor added.
“Oh, I think Regina is better in that respect.” Sophia replied, and I nodded. She was, by all means, spot on. Regina was indeed the snake of the two, if you stopped to think about it for a second.

“What about you? Are you ok?” I asked.

“Yeah, everything is fine here and boring since Blanche left.” Viktor replied.
“She sure was more fun to be around since… you know.” He added.

I wasn’t sure Sophia agreed, but she didn’t seem displeased either.

Our conversation went into a blur around this point, I know we continued to speak of the same subject for maybe a couple more minutes but then we went back to our old subjects that we never got tired of. Pointless chit-chat, which felt heavenly for me at this time. I was sick of “serious talk.”

Just after 21, when things were settling down and we were pretty much down at picking random subjects to keep the coffee going, I took the liberty in looking out the window again and just watching the lights go on around town which is always a nice thing to see, because the lights around this town are old-style 17th century London style. They look exactly like those little poles with a small glass box on top in which you lit the candle, but now light bulbs are used, and the glass is a bit yellowish and opaque, making it look and feel exactly the same. Not that I know how it felt back then, but Regina seemed comfortable around them and not squirming her eyes like she usually does under neon lights.

I saw a shadowy figure at the corner of the terrace and nudged both of them to look at that but by the time they turned their head it was gone. I dismissed it quickly and went back to the chat, which was nearing to an end.

Me and Viktor walked Sophia back home and then we both walked for a while together before splitting up in separate directions, but in the little time we spent together he said to me something I’ll never forget.

“Hei man, listen… I know you’ve always felt like you can do anything, that’s what I always liked about you anyway. But this thing that you’re doing right now… I’m not sure it will end so well, for any of us. I’m just saying… you always knew deep down inside that things are not what they appear to be, and you’ve taught me that too, but what if they are? What if Regina and all of it is just what history taught, or tried to teach us, that they are?”

“What?”

“Demons.”

At the time, I told him exactly the opposite of what I thought…
“Maybe you’re right.”

And my answer hasn’t changed since then – my answer to him – but over time it kept feeling less and less opposite towards my thoughts.

back to my vampire roots. [story part 27]

We stayed in Sweden for more than a month and just… didn’t do anything special. Well, for you it might be special, but for me it kind of started to blur and each new day became more and more like the last.

I was amazed at first by Lars and his family but I soon got accustomed with it, and as for dinner like I mentioned earlier, well, let’s just say it wasn’t screaming.

We only stayed with them for about a week and then moved to a hotel and Regina kept being on and off for sometimes days in-between without seeing her. I figured I should just go home, but she was deterring me each time. Sure, Gotheborg was nice, but I missed home nonetheless.

Just under a month since we were in Sweden, around two in the morning, Regina burst into the hotel room all excited and cheerful. I wasn’t sleeping because, well, that’s another interesting story.

Everybody that is “normal” and is only forced to pull an all-night for studying or partying will strongly believe that the human nature is strongly against functioning night-time. Because they feel like shit.

But this is false. If you only do it once, yes, you feel like shit, but ask any person that works nights how is it, and each of them will tell you that “You get used to it.”

And you do get used to it. I was by now fully active and lively during the night and always sleepy and tired, my body telling me to go to sleep, during the day. I had my sleeping schedule fully inverted. So no, I wasn’t sleeping.

In any case, Regina burst into the room announcing.

“We’re leaving!” She was even happier than me that we were leaving by judging her expression.
“Awesome. Finally…” I replied.

“But where to?” I added.

“Well, you’re going home, I’m going to the end of the world.” And she giggled.
“I’m coming with you.” I immediately interjected.

“No, you’re not. It’s too far and if Sigismund is there, too dangerous.” Regina replied.

Well this was new, usually she kind of forced me to go with her or do different things, but now it was the other way around. She was sending me home. But, as any human, you want what you can’t have…

“Come on, it can’t be that far. Where is it?” I asked.

“No.” She said.

“No what?” I replied.

“No, don’t even think about it.” Yes, I was planning in following her ass. Although that would prove difficult, if not impossible.

“Come on, you drag me all this way, make me literally open tombs for you, and now you’re ditching me?”

“Things would be much easier and more accessible if you would just accept me already…” She was referring to the fact that I continuously denied her from turning me. It’s like she was possessed or something with this thing. Seriously, Viktoria made it abundantly clear that she, Regina, hasn’t turned anyone in hundreds of years, well, except Blanche which I forced her too, and now she was obsessed about turning me.

You only know, from the story, about the only time she tried doing it and I refused, but trust me, she tried each and every time we were together. I won’t turn this story into a “fantasy romance” novel and just provide sex scenes each second post, but trust me, I was her main food supply, and she rarely fed without it.

Every third of fourth night, we had to fight over the fact of why I don’t want to be turned.
I… I had a lot of arguments against it.

Here’s what I told a reader about it:
Even sick, even in pain, it’s never an easy decision to make. Try thinking more about the implications behind it, other than “yay no death”. Movies romanticize it and make it look like a blessing, but it’s not. And it’s not romantic. There’s nothing nice about it and you can never, ever  make peace with the idea of murdering humans to keep yourself alive.

Regina was an angel and yet she left a trail of bodies over the centuries. A genocide if you wish, and she was haunted by each and every face, every day. She had thousands of drawings, photos and notes, names and everything, with almost every human life she’d ever taken. You wouldn’t want to be in her head not even for a second. It’s not a blessing.

Most of them just shut down, go into nothingness, they just stop feeling. But that’s stopping almost everything. You can do that as a human also, but harder. You just become a sociopath, with no feelings. That’s no way to live eternity.

And no, you don’t get used to it. There are things that you get used to, but manslaughter isn’t one of them. You’re either a serial killer, or you’re not. It’s not something you learn over time.

Yes, you can feed without killing, but more than often you’re forced to, otherwise you would expose you and your entire kinship to that human. Some humans accepted it better than others, some thought nothing of it and were allowed to walk freely. They had no idea how close to death they even came.

My relationship with Regina was weird. We were together, but not really.
We would at times, stay in the same apartment, and I would sleep in one room while she was in the other room with another human being, feeding on him, which more than often involved sex, and then in the early hours of the morning coming next to me as if nothing happened. And I learned to accept that, but it’s never easy sleeping with your back to a person who just drained someone of every drop of blood just a few meters away from you, and who still smells like iron and copper, not even mentioning she just had sex with that very same one.

But who was I to judge? I was happy she came, every time, and sleep with me. And maybe if in her place, I would have done the same as she did. And maybe if like her, we would have done it together.

So from all those movies and books that one sees and reads, the picture is very much distorted. Nobody goes around sipping blood from a glass all day long just as easy as he would buy it from a store. Hospitals don’t supply blood as easy as you think, they are out of it themselves anyway. Nobody has a full fridge of nice bags full of blood at their disposal and just heats them up in the microwave. That’s retarded.

Most of them have to feed straight from a human because I suspect, there’s more than blood what they are taking. I don’t know what else, but if you see the difference between a vampire who just fed on a human and one who just fed on human blood from a bag, you’ll understand. It’s ridiculously different, as if the feeding itself from a human offered something else, something invisible. I don’t know what.

And no, there’s no easy going around it. The whole “compelling” thing is a non-sense. There is a certain degree of hypnotic behavior or… influence if you wish, but it only goes as much as suggesting certain things, making some idea weigh more in one’s head… and I would guess it’s relative to the vampire’s charisma and age, and way of putting things, and not his pupils going big and just “hypnotizing someone”. That’s crap and doesn’t work. It would be nice, sure, it would mean almost no more human deaths, but it doesn’t exist, and people run and scream when bitten. I know I did.

And the ones that scream don’t stop until you either kill them or make them shut up in some other way, nobody just gets used with blood being drawn out by a monster from him. No girl just suddenly starts “feeling horny” and just “gives in” and starts liking it.

No. It’s horrifying to see and hear it and even more horrifying to see someone walking in the room and coming out in a bag. And it’s as horrifying for you doing it. Because if you can’t get used to it, you’ll forever be haunted by it, like Regina. But it’s either kill or be killed, and it sounds “logic” – but it’s not. Who gives you the right to murder thousands of people just so you can live. What makes you so much more important than them?

And many, many other things, make it a curse as much as a blessing.
No family (well, Lars did it, but he was pretty much a rare exception), no normal life, moving all the time, always hidden, no people to rely on, no true LIFETIME friends. Nobody to comfort you when it’s hard, nobody to hug you when it’s cold outside and you fall asleep in front of your TV.

No, when all those things above happen, you are just waking up, preparing to go out in the dark and the cold, and take yet another life. And it’s horrible each time, and all of them, all of them fight up until their last second. Those who do fight, they never stop squirming and fighting to get out from the clutches of the devil, but they never do. They fight until the end, without realizing that fighting it is the worst thing you could do.

So if you ask me why I refused, then I can only assume you’ve never seen a vampire feeding.
And then if you ask me so then, how could you sleep and love such a thing, then I can only assume you’ve also never seen how kind and loving one can be. It’s a paradox, at least for some of them, including Regina.

Demon by night, when they feed and hunt, angel by day, when they are just like you and me.
If there is a heaven and hell – then I tell you, from the bottom of my heart, that the “bouncer” has a really hard time deciding where a vampire will go. I could never decide where to send one, ever, and believe, I’ve tried.

It was official. I loved Regina. I loved the way she made me feel, you know, like life was worth it. Life was good.

I loved the way she looked like when she slept. I love the little birthmark she had on a hip, I loved her eyes, I loved everything. I loved her name, whatever it was, and I loved how I heard this song in my head every time I thought about her.

I also loved how she licked her lips sometimes before she started to speak, and mostly, I loved the way her laugh sounded. I loved her smile.

And as for becoming a vampire, well, some value life, even if it ends, more than eternity. I’m not saying I do, not, I had other reasons and this was not one of them, but life…

This is our life. It’s terrible and short and incredible and thin and beautiful… and none of us come alive out of it. And that’s ok, because it’s worth dying for. You know… life is worth dying for, that is my incredibly short, stupid but true and from the bottom of my heart meaning of life line, the only one that will ever be enough. It’s stupid to search for complex meanings and purposes in life.

Live it, live it like there is no tomorrow and live it until you realize it’s worth dying for, because trust me, you won’t realize that until you’re about to do just that, die for it, because it was so beautiful and so tragic in the same time. Die with a smile on your face, and accept, that the tragedy of dying, is a part of life itself, is a part of you, and that is the thing that makes life so intense in the first place. Knowing it will end.

I feel I digressed way too much from the story but I’ll continue anyway.

As soon as Regina once again made a point about how I should accept to be turned, I gave up and just told her that fine, I’ll go home, but I made sure that she saw I was more than angry, I was upset, at her.

That night she didn’t even came to the hotel and I couldn’t care less. I was on a plane even before sunrise and headed for home.
You might think that was childish of me, which I won’t argue against, because I was a child. And that was the point. I didn’t want to argue or push even more in this subject.

That was one big reason for me refusing the turning – I wouldn’t want to be a kid forever, no.
In any case, I arrived home that very same day, I was back in that small town where everything has started, I was back at seeing my friends. I forgot about Regina rather quickly, being overwhelmed by everything that I missed, but I soon realized that even back home, things were very much different and not like they used to be. Blanche had made sure to change them.

One vampire in one town could make all the difference in the world. Especially if it’s a small 35,000 inhabitants town.

poem for the heart

Couldn’t sleep last night so… This was the result.

 

“Regina”

bound by chains,
wrapped by desolation,
knowing she remains,
forever in damnation.

winds of change keep blowing,
sending us to our graves,
the queen keeps always showing,
eternally against the waves.

she’s slain the demon Sadness
but the heart is unaware,
her ocean of madness,
in the desert of despair.

she roams this earth without a pair,
forever lonely in her bed,
all you see except her hair,
is the anger in her head.

her gaze is like your shadow,
knowing everything there is to know,
like the rabbit on the meadow,
invisible against the snow.

one look at the queen is enough,
for her smile is hypnotic,
to make your existence very tough,
the most potent narcotic.

and make no mistake,
about seeing it again,
from your dream you need to wake,
or it shall be your bane.

her smile shows once only,
for those who are unlucky,
and then it leaves you lonely,
but consider yourself lucky.

for she stayed once in the past,
ripping through a heart with joy,
gone were my hopes in a blast,
learning that it was everything she wanted to destroy.

go forth and tell the others now,
never smile to the girl who always shows,
free pass to their hearts this will allow,
as long as the wind still blows.

the queen and her mate,
must never be allowed,
to fulfill their fate,
our lives this will cloud.

dark hair and mystic eyes,
her existence is unknown,
the mate is now alone and cries,
his tears are set in stone.

and forever the world will speak,
of the queen with mystic eyes,
the one which is unique,
because she never dies.