He was a bad vampire. For one thing, he was severely anemic, which is something you could say of all vampires, I suppose. In his case, the problem was far, far worse. He claimed he hated the way the blood made him feel, all dirty and bloated and, well, as he put it, with a look of disgust on his gauntly handsome face…bloody alive. No matter how many times you told him how good-looking he was with a a litre or two inside him, he'd refuse to believe it. His was clearly a case of distorted body-image. What he imagined that he saw in the mirror wasn't what he looked like in real life—it was all in his head—and no amount of reassurance and confidence-building on my part could shake his self-delusion; in fact, part of the problem was that he cast no reflection at all. He spent hours locked in the bedroom standing in front of the full-length mirror staring at nothing whatsoever. I'd knock on the door begging him to open up, knowing what he was doing to himself. At midnight, I had to coax him to take the tiniest sips from my wrist just to keep him from wasting away to dust and bones. Later, I'd wake up in the wee hours before dawn and hear him retching in the toilet down the hall.
Loving him was exhausting, more enervating than if he'd just sunk his fangs into my jugular and exsanguinated me completely once and for all. Oh, if only he'd been an ordinary vampire! I didn't know how to help him, but it wasn't for want of trying. Clearly I was in over my head. My friends all told me to leave him, but I still thought I could turn things around. I guess I should have seen it coming. The signs were all there from the start. But I was blind-sided all the same. One day I came home early from work and caught him dressed in one of my negligees. He was lying languidly on the chaise in the sunroom, the binds all drawn, trying so suck blood from the inside of his own elbow. I ran from the room in tears. For once he came after me, pursuing me through the house until he caught me, crouched among the ferns in the television room, sobbing my heart out. He explained as best he could that he was suffering from creature dysphoria. What the hell did that mean, I wanted to know. It meant that he considered himself a mortal man trapped inside a vampire's body. He wanted to go out in broad daylight like every other mortal human being. He wanted to be photographed. He wanted to drink orange juice instead of blood. For crissakes, he wanted to be a vegan! What could I say? It was preposterous! The more he explained, the more I could feel my love and patience shriveling away, replaced by disgust and cold contempt. Does that make me an awful person? I'm sorry. I couldn't help myself. I thought I was married to a vampire. I couldn't help but feel betrayed and deceived. I pitied him, yes, his predicament was awful. He quoted me the grim statistics. An alarming percentage of vampires in his situation ended up staked through the heart. But what about me? I had needs too! Didn't I deserve to be happy?
We tried to make it work but after a while we couldn't ignore the writing on the wall. We split, as they say of celebrities in the news, mutually and amicably—at least on the surface. But speaking for me alone, I felt a deep well of bitterness and disgust and, I regret to say it, even rage that took ages to dissipate. For a long time I could almost have driven the stake through his undead heart myself. But life's too short to waste on eternal hatred.
I still see him from time to time, pale, thin, walking gingerly down the street in the sun, pretending to be a normal mortal. He may be fooling everyone else, but he'll never fool me.I know who—and what—he really is. He seems happy enough and I don't begrudge him that. And, in truth, I guess I've mostly moved on, too. I've found someone else to love me properly and, believe it or not, so as he. To each his own, I guess. To me, he'll never be an honest-to-god real human being. No amount of prescription medication, surgery, or sunscreen will change that. But who am I to judge, right?
No comments:
Post a Comment