So I Might Be a Vampire - Book 1 (Original Version)

17: Waiting for Something

I thought about my new potential problem on the bus ride home and then eventually shrugged it off. It wasn't like anybody was going to come anyway. If anything, it would give me something to do on Thursday nights besides planning my weekly protests at HTDK. I liked to keep busy and hell, maybe I could actually catch up on my reading.

So I went ahead and started to put up my little fliers on the way home. I only put up three of them, one at the bus stop since I was there anyway, another one at the Supermarket on the way to my house and then, just for kicks, I plastered one onto the side of the phone booth in the supermarket.

I considered hitting the late night diner for a quick meal, but the sun was coming up, and I had already learned that staying up to watch the sunrise was a pretty bad idea. I would put the rest of the flyers out tomorrow and look at the sunrise from someplace safe, like inside my apartment. Or even better, on TV.

As sunrises go, they're all pretty over-rated. Do you know how long you have to wait until you get a nice good look at the sun? A lot of people have never even seen the sunrise, so Hollywood is able to sell another lie about vampires without even trying.

For those of you who have never seen a sunrise, you really should make a point to do it. Get up early or stay up late and watch the sun come up one morning, and you'll realize it's nothing quite as dramatic or romantic as the movies make it out to be. Yes, being in the direct sunlight will probably kill me (eventually) since I now have a high sensitivity to light. It's more of an advanced kind of rare skin cancer though, the kind of cancer that catches on fire and make me have to take at least a day off to let the skin grow back. One hundred percent nothing like the movies. I don't think I can say that enough.

Sunrises tend to be slow affairs. It's more of a gradual brightening of the sky where you can make out shapes slowly, and then start to see more clearly after a while. A whole half hour can go by like this where it just grows brighter and brighter, but you know what? Even then there is no sun. You can wait an entire bloody hour before the sun even decides to make an appearance, and by that time any vampire in the area has sauntered off to someplace dark to continue getting completely piss drunk rather than wait around anymore. The whole story about the sun coming up and the vampire turning to dust? Yeah... not likely to happen unless you have a really slow moving vampire.

These days, if I wanted to watch the sunrise, I watched from inside. From behind the curtains.

Even at home with a bowl of Cheerios in my lap, I still couldn't figure out what to do about my meeting room. Then I just decided to say fuck it all and went to bed.

And no: I do not sleep in a coffin.

***

You can find anything you want on the Internet. Craigslist or Kijiji is especially useful for finding all of the stuff that nobody wants anymore, or for finding all of the weird people with foot fetishes and bizarre missed connections. Do yourself a favor and do not go down the rabbit hole that is Missed Connections on Craigslist; it might be days before you emerge, with or without your sanity. In any case, are you looking for some old junk, some new junk, or somebody to haul that junk for you? Then it's all right there. If you want, you can find people to smoke out with, people to hang out with, regular (but discreet) fuck buddies, or in some cases, not-so-discreet, if that is your taste. Anything you want, it's there. If you're lucky, you might even run across my advert from my Vampires Anonymous meeting. Go ahead and do a search and it will pop up. I know it's there. After all, I've been posting and reposting the same damn advert every single week.

I got kind of lazy and despondent after my first meeting where, as I predicted, no one at all showed up. Nobody had called or emailed me, so I knew that nobody was coming, but it still depressed the shit outta me.

So I read my book.

It was some story by someone I'd never heard before called "The Survivors." It was just getting good when Sammy popped up to see me, interrupting the vivid description of puke that the author was obsessing over.

"There's some dude here looking for you."

I almost fell off my chair.

"What? Really?

"Nah, I'm just fucking with you. How's it going?"

Some days I found Sammy unbearably cute and sexy, especially the way she played with her curls when she was distracted. This wasn't one of those times, and I told her that.

"Yeah? Well, fuck you too."

I almost went after her since she actually seemed hurt, but in the end, I just sat there and went back to my book. It was either that or try to get into the vampire club, but I wasn't in the mood for a beating or humiliation.

Something is calming about an empty room. I don't know if this is a real calm or what, but I know for sure that every Thursday night at around 9 PM, I'd head up and it would always be reliably empty. No one was showing up to discuss their problems with being a vampire. Who knows, maybe other vampires didn't get depressed or question their mortality or lack of it, or maybe I was just defective. Either way, Thursday nights were reliably dead times, and I'd catch up on my reading. Sometimes Sammy would come up to keep me company when she wasn't torturing some poor schlub downstairs; other times she'd just stay away and let me have my peace.

She didn't know I was a vampire and I liked it that way.

I didn't want to see the fear in her eyes, thinking I was about to kill her.

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