To Be Seen by a Vampire
Okay, it’s time I came clean about something. I fucking love, love vampires.
No, not the Twilight ones. I'm talking about the ones who are a bit more on the "bad boy" side of the scale.
Dracula is hot.
Lestat is hot.
Eric Northman is hot.
I first realized I had a thing for vampires when I watched the 1992 rendition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula with - the fucking gorgeous - Gary Oldman. Aside from the fact that I have a fetish for older men, Oldman encapsulated everything I came to love about these mystical creatures.
Seduction. Wisdom. Danger. Fear. Eternity.
The thing is, I’ve always been drawn to the darkness, to the flirtation with danger...and on a deeper level, I’ve always felt different. In all honesty, I was a lonely-ass kid.
Perhaps we all feel a bit unique in our adolescence. For me, even now, I still find myself often feeling like an outsider. I have difficulties expressing the thoughts in my head, and so I end up writing obsessively to get it out on paper. I feel awkward in large groups, I hate parties of more than a couple people, and gods forbid a room suddenly goes quiet so as to listen to me tell a story. I don’t like being complimented, but I also love it. I hate attention, but please don’t leave. It’s...complicated.
The character and myth of Dracula is also complex. He is fed by blood from his victims, yes, but he wants more than that. He wants companionship. He has the power to seduce and woo, to kill without consequence, to be so completely fucking free of the shame associated with morality. Yet Dracula, at least in the 1992 rendition, still seeks love, still seeks redemption, still seeks belonging. His immortality is just as unavoidable as our own future death...and he pursues what he desires to his own ultimate demise.
In my youth, I wanted nothing but to belong. I was primarily a loner in school. I had a few groups that I would hang out with on occasion, but I never belonged anywhere really. No guys liked me, or even asked to go on a date. My first boyfriend was at age 20. Looking back, I don’t see myself as being necessarily unattractive by the standards of high schoolers. But I was a geek, a kid who made good grades, and more importantly, I was one who constantly tried to be liked.
The worst thing you can do at that age is show vulnerability to your classmates; they will eat you alive. For me, the cool kids were the ones hanging out smoking cigarettes as they skipped class, the ones who were going out and partying all weekend, the ones who my parents would have lost their shit over me hanging out with. I wanted them to see me. They never really did, because I think my desire to please my parents outweighed my desire to be with people who felt...familiar.
Vampires are pariahs; enemies of society, the ones who thrive on death and chaos. They fuck whoever they want and they eat whoever they want. (Hot.) Yet in every rendition of the vampire story, vampires seek connection that goes beyond the blood of a human being.
In the end, I wonder if my arousal and draw to vampires is somehow a manifestation of my deep desire to be seen and accepted. There’s something deeply human in that sentiment, isn’t there? I suppose we all want to be seen. I do know that my teenage self often thought something like this:
Wouldn’t it be cool, wouldn’t it be sexy, wouldn’t it be fucking terrifying to be seen and wanted by someone who also happened to have spent centuries searching for a companion...and after all that searching, all that loss...they chose you?
That mix of acceptance, finding my place, and fear of love and commitment has haunted me my entire life. While I know a vampire will never show up at my doorstep professing their love, the scarier reality is that one day there might be a human being who does the same thing. Vampires are fiction, but what they represent is very real. Within the context of my fantasy, I'm able to explore the emotions that pervade my real life and -- much like the monsters of these stories -- determine for myself how much I am willing to cede in the search for companionship.
About the Author: SubtleShadow is a queer, poly, sadomasochist and playful kinkster with an insatiable curiosity about the world and a desire to explore all of it.
