How a 42-year writer is like a 108-year old vampire that is a bit manic depressive and might kill you if he has sex with You.....

Okay, I know, I know I have become way too obsessed with popular vampire fiction. But you know what? I don’t care! I like it. It’s dangerous and sexy and hot and tragic. And it helps me get through my humdrum days of boring, un-dramatic relationship problems when I can imagine I’m actually caught up in some sexy vampire werewolf love triangle or am spending my last moments with my vampire soul mate before we are both killed by the Volturi; or am innocently trying to seduce my vampire boyfriend while he tries to be “good” and not drain my blood.

I think it’s like that whenever you read a lot of first-person narrative. You start noticing things the protagonist would notice. You start comparing things in your life to things in the protagonist’s life. Now I know 42 is nothing close to 108 but since I seem to talk and act like I am 15 years old, at times it can feel like a monumental difference. He says some funny expressions that sometimes makes me think that he has lived through the black plague, the civil war and the women’s suffrage movement. Like the other day I was just like petty mad about something and he tugs on my arm and was like “Why are you acting so cold?” I totally had to bite my tongue, but inside I was like “what is this 1881?” And that tiny quick-witted quip starts me on another daydream. It is 1881. I am a suffragette and an carrying a parasol and wearing petticoats marching through the streets of London when a dark-haired stranger with a huge widow’s peak and an heavy gait saves me from being pelted with pebbles from the angry throngs of pig-headed men. It’s all confusion and chaos as a riot breaks out and I am disoriented amongst the masses. But he leads me through the crowds and down a dark alley where he grabs me by the shoulders and.... you know.... like drains all my blood. And then I look up and he’s like “What’s wrong with you? Now You’re giving me the silent treatment too?” I can’t very well be like oh I was daydreaming you were a vampire in the 1800s again. I already have reached my threshold of teen girl teasing from this one. There is no room for any more.

The Daydreaming happens more often than I’d like. I’d say for the last two months, if I’m not with him, I’d reading about Vampires, talking about vampires, talking about him, thinking about vampires, thinking about him, googling vampires (like the stars of the movie, the behind the scenes stuff about the authors and movie and TV shows... nothing like how do I actually become a vampire, I’m not that far-gone!), or like with my parents or at Bikrams. The two were bound to collide in my small pea-sized brain someday.

Sometimes when he is lecturing me about safety or rudely making me nervous about my trip by creating crazy What-if scenarios and sending me horror-stories of women raped and beaten in Buenos Aires, I try to not stomp my foot like a 10 year old or do the whole Nyah Nyah Nyah Nyah thing with my fingers stuck in my ears, but imagine that he is nervous about my safety because he is so old and he has seen so many terrible things and he sees himself as my world protector (although the whole he won’t carry my groceries anymore in an attempt to prepare me for lugging my backpack around Argentina for 15 days doesn’t really jibe with this particular daydream). Sometimes I imagine that he was a poet laureate in WW1. So as the battles at Flanders Fields were being fought and the battles on the Western Front were being waged, he strolls the sidelines watching young men getting shot at and blown to bits and he quietly writes down his reflections like a fly on the wall unable to help or engage with the soldiers in any way. He enters the barracks and sees the cruel hazing amongst comrades and feels the undercurrent of fear and loss through everyone. But he isn’t able to help them through their pain or even tell a few fresh jokes to clear their heads for a few minutes because he is not one of them. He sees all the pain in the world; he sees the worst of humanity but remains disengaged from it all.

The daydreaming is fun for the most part. I almost always “awake” back to reality with a smile on my face. But the Carl Jung part of me would say I am obviously subverting my personal fears for the relationship behind a superimposed heightened reality in order to save my psyche from acute self-awareness. (thank you damned 3rd-year Psychology elective). I don’t really want to deal with the problems we have. So I imagine we don’t have those problems. I imagine we have the problems that can be resolved in a 600 page novel (well a four-part series, is more accurate I guess).

I guess it all stems from wondering if he really likes me. Who is the chasee and who is the chaser? I thought I was the chasee at first and I would say like 60% of the time I still do. But in the most important times, I feel like the chaser. Like a very inadequate chaser that stumbles around in the dark and falls asleep with a kitty cat at her feet but wakes up with a birds nest on her head. So I dream. I dream about what it would be like if early to bed really meant early to bed because if we stay up I might have sex with you and kill you by accident. I dream that t is enormous self-restraint that keeps us apart not lack of attraction or the building piles of work waiting for him the next day. I dream that one day there will be broken bed frames and holes in the walls and bruises and fang marks all over my body. I dream about it all. And then I wake up.