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This is a symptoms list. Feel free to armchair diagnose me.

There is something clinically wrong with me, I’m well aware. I don’t know what it is.

I sincerely believe I’m dead or undead most of the time. On bad days, I take active measures to injure or kill myself to see if it works. On bad weeks, I forget I need to eat and base my sleep schedule on boredom. On bad months, I go back to places I believe I died and revert to behaviors that injure others. Double bookkeeping is manageable most times, yet doesn’t always stop my acting out.

I’m antagonistic towards others. Nothing they do makes sense to me, I am disgusted and disgusting. The only people I get along with are as awful as I am, better to be alone. If I’m bored, I start drama or make up a better persona to attract people I don’t intend to keep.

My thoughts are scattered, I believe things that don’t make sense. I don’t know what I’m doing or why, start and stop at a whim. Shallow emotions or adrenaline. I barely exist and I shouldn’t.

I don’t talk to people of if I can help it. My speech is disorganized, I speak in metaphors, I can’t follow a conversation.

I smell blood that isn’t there, rot that isn’t there. I see dirt and viscera on my fingers. Shadows move around me and I’ve long since stopped caring what they do out of my sight.

Delusional disoriented dick. I’m neither creative nor anxious, not much paranoid. Can’t tell how extreme I’ve gotten until I look back and realize I’ve got secrets to keep.

Today is a good day. My arms still ache from my last bad day, but at least the bite marks didn’t scar.

I’m not sure I want to be better. I would like to know what’s wrong.

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If asked to describe the state of my mind, I would need a pair of binoculars. A tracking pack may be more effective, provided you can catch to release.

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Content warning for implication of self-harm

Everyone says their skin is so uncomfortable, they wish they could take it off. Then they gasp and try to take your knife when you actually do. Hypocrites.

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My running list of foods I can reliably consume without undesirable side effects include an embarrassing amount of red. Cranberry juice and red velvet cake pops are the only things I’ve never had an issue with, though it’s a short list to begin with.

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CW for death and burial

Grave dirt comes up in a few modern vampire interpretations, seemingly originating from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, though there are older myths taking the stance that demons (which were then indistinct from vampires) are night creatures, or that the waking dead would return to their grave and slumber in daylight hours.

It has been so long since I’ve been buried. Folklore in our tradition dictates the dead be returned to the earth, leaving the undead to claw their way back to the land of the living. Boxes and depth are preventatives, unneeded when the body isn’t expected to remain in its place. I have spent cumulative weeks in the ground, made a home for myself in the dirt.

I’ve considered taking a trip out to the forest, reacquainting myself with a grave of my own. Not truly my grave, that one is some ways away and nigh unreachable from where I reside these days. I could get there without much trouble. Getting back is another thing. Skin and clothes stained black brown, cold as death, strength long drained into the soil. It wouldn’t be the same. Death for the undying follows a procedure, somebody to know if you fail to rise again.

That’s tempting in itself. A final grave. It’s never been that easy, but I can hope that this time it will. Gather the materials and abandon my faith, wishing whatever binds me here abandons me back. There’s a last time for everything.

I shouldn’t. I have reasons to stay. The call of the dirt is alluring nonetheless.

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One of these days, I’m going to catch a bloodborne disease. It’s only a matter of time.

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I seek out vampires in entertainment. They’re the beautiful modern type, yet rarely so far off that I can’t relate. There’s a reason we’re categorized together. It irks me how frequently I run into the concept of the good ones, who don’t drink human blood (or otherwise sap lifeforce) or kill for their survival.

I’m not one of the good ones. I can’t turn back time on what’s done, can’t say I’d want to. It’s not logical that I would need to continue on that way, taxonomically human and all. The emptiness grows the longer I wait, my health deteriorating in proportion. Psychosomatic, neglecting my body, who can say why. Alienation, low empathy. I thieve my fill. What I take is everything I have, and it never lasts.

I won’t die, or haven’t yet. That would be setting my hopes too high. All I can do is watch my faculties escape me. I’m too selfish for that. Bound to act out eventually.

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Content warning for abuse and trauma

My being delusional dissuades others from believing the truth of my stories. I’m sure there are remnants out there, where I’m not looking. I prefer the disbelief, a cloak that obscures me from consequence. The pressure is to bury this as a departure from reality, not excavate it further. You’ll never know the extent of what I’ve done, what was done to me to reach this summit. I won’t let you look, either. We’re on the downslope now, and that’s all on the other side.

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I don’t understand the controversy of physical alterhumanity. I would say that I am physically nonhuman, a vampire. To my awareness, there is no taxonomical criteria to be a vampire. We vary by region, time period, and culture. The most common qualification of a vampire besides undeath is desecration (bad person, witch, circumstances of death and burial). Bonus points for relying on the life force of the living to subsist. Otherwise starting from nonhumanity has been described, but that’s another layer of complications.

I have been dead, I rose from my grave, and I meet at least my culture’s requirements of vampirism. They made me this, through repetition and coercion. The rites were done, set to stick. I’m more of a walking corpse than a beautiful monster, somewhere between historical and modern. It used to be viewed with a more spiritual lens, one that carried to my experience, if not to widespread entertainment.

There is no biological marker because the condition is not medical, is not a species. That’s not to say that alterhumans with defined species can’t be physically so, but I wouldn’t know how to begin that argument. Short of discovering a group with more shared characteristics and figuratively putting them under the microscope, which would be a tad rude, vampires are loosely bound in classification.

I don’t feel any kinship with humans, not as though I were one of them. Taxonomically (I like this word), I am human. I am a vampire nonetheless. Hardly antithetical.

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The memories come back in droves, running together and scattering with each collision.

It’s comical how many times I’ve been buried alive. There was a favorite spot, though not the only one. Today, I feel the dirt caked onto my fingers. I hadn’t realized I remembered the temperature, but it changed the texture of the soil. Loosely packed and crunching around me, a shallow grave with something wet soaking through. Every time, the taste of blood. No images, just the sensations. Touch alone.

My love for winter is ambivalent. It’s my favorite season, cold enough around here to see my breath breathing through my nose. No bother huffing just right, any proof of life is painted on the wind. I’m always so cold. I’d say it comes with the worst flashbacks, but how would I know? They come as they please, a frightened herd going anywhere but where they came from. I’m glad not to be prey.

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Content warning for abuse and neglect

I’ve been avoiding going out all day, despite the growing list of errands to run. It’s more than deciding today is cold or needing a rest. A certainty that if I leave I will be locked out in that cold. If someone were to drag me out that door, I would be taking the paint with me under my nails. I didn’t put up a fight back then, I’ve got to make up for it somehow.

That door doesn’t lead outside, this is an apartment complex. I have the key. Irrational, but no less real to me. Nothing new there.

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I miss the blood I miss the suffering I miss watching the life drain as the skin changes color I miss the death that has always been so much more beautiful that life

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I’m not allowed to donate blood for a year. They did my iron test and it was fine, then they did my iron test and it was not fine. They also sent me several emails trying to ascertain my sex and general existence, though I’m not sure of their success. I’ve decided it’s none of my concern until twelve months from now.

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Content warning for cold as punishment, neglect and torture

I get frostbitten easily. My circulation is poor, heart and veins are in on it.

I was stuck in the deep freeze, restocking, while my coworkers loaded carts. It couldn’t have been much more than ten minutes.

My body doesn’t regulate like it’s supposed to. It’s the same with heat, but that’ll have me fainting. The cold is something else.

It used to be a punishment, or else entertainment for people who held that power over me. Lock me outside, put me in the garage freezer, leave me in the woods in my pajamas.

The mounting tremors that make my muscles ache until the pain outweighs the cold. The slipping away, conserving energy and booting back up until I just can’t cycle through again. Knowing that if I fall asleep like this, I won’t wake up. And then I do.

I get frostbitten easily, but I don’t feel the cold anymore. I’ve decided I want to, and I’m learning.

Went to a memorial in October. The ceremony was at midnight, and it was cold. It took me two minutes to start shivering, two hours to stop.

I will not be so cold I stop shaking. I refuse to steel my skin against the wind. I go outside without my coat because I want to feel it. I go inside because nobody holds my key but me. The cold is a choice now, and so is the heat. I am allowed to be comfortable, with my own permission.

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I spent too many years surviving off of candy and bread to believe I need food to sustain this form. It keeps going on rocks, leather, drywall, anything. Can’t kill what’s already dead.

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It strikes me as romantic, a gesture of trust, to let someone take my blood. Unfortunately, like most of me, it doesn’t taste good. There is something wrong with my body, wrong in that I would not taste better than your average human but strikingly worse. I’m too far rotted to be worth sinking your teeth into.

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Fake blood suits me. It’s sweet, too bright on my skin and staining scarlet. Reminds me my self-image is incomplete without carnage. My memories are only mine with copper gore. As inside, so outside. And as far as anyone needs to know, it is but a costume.