Vampirism

You can't figure me out entirely. You think I'm pretty in a bizzare, unsexy way and with the wrong clothes on. It's not that they don't go with my personality, but it's a bad style. You know I get good grades, and you guess I'm smart, but you think I have a fragmented, unorganized way of speaking and it shows in my messy writing. You hate it when I laugh nervously as I say serious things that I'm not sure about, or when I think I've said something scandalous that actually made no sense at all. It makes you nervous, you get a vibe almost of hysteria from my part, and you also conclude that I'm very self-conscious. You were surprised at my essay in English and how it was considerably better than my Spanish paper. There are things that don't add up, you've been surprised at me and my unpredictability is the reason you don't discard me completely, but you'd like to see some of my finer insights taken to their full potential. You feel I'm so unlike you, so unlike your rigid boots, stern stares, and straight-up posture. But you're sometimes amused. Even if you don't show it, and you tell me to sit properly, you find it refreshing that I put my legs up on the bench during class. You think I have a lot to learn, and not just in school.

You find me warm and smart. You've always seen me so much as a woman, soft (if not flabby), so prone to tears, ridiculous tears for tragedies you think are past or should be irrelevant to me. You do believe I get carried away, and like any woman, am a bit spoiled, and you think I belong to a more delicate and privileged social group than I realize. But then there's the boyish side in me that surprises you. My large sweaters and the need I've always shown to be part of the guys. You embrace that and find it endearing, but not at all attractive, for when it comes to sex I am at the bottom of the list for you, not only because of my clumsy movements and lack of sensual awareness, but because you have seen me in all kinds of light. You see my destiny and see a bright future. You see promise in me (you don't like the word potential), promise that you know will be kept, but you've seen me slip and fall, and become more human, and you hope not too much so, because you love people who are unearthly and strange, who dizzy you with their articulate doubts and observations which are your hidden doubts and observations and who are so unlike the people you grew up with who sat in the sun and smoked away their disquiet. My way of talking and weaving and twisting and unweaving make you feel like the passive listener but not at all less of a man. You respect my words but in the end I'm just a woman who blabbers on and on...

You hate yourself for still seeing a goddess when I appear before you. You try so hard to make me unattractive, but you are seduced by my softness, my flowing hair, my innocent (you would say naïve) smile, my quirky expressions. You see the ether, the lotus flower, the growing peace and maturity (is it maturity?), contrasting yourself, making your darkness, your cynism, your stale and rotten ideals sting. All of this your eyes give away. You feel angry about my existence in general; maybe not angry anymore, but certainly annoyed. You know that I am fake, my whole persona is somehow an elaborate mask created by this bland insecure girl who has no identity, no voice, no self-esteem. And it is all the worse that you were influenced by me in the past, that you trusted me, opened up to me, bowed down to me. For you that is unforgiveable, something to be buried and denied. You still see visions of me lost in the heart of darkness, hysterical, naked, dragging myself. That is why you can't believe that I still strike you as the lotus flower. You take pleasure in my blunders, which remind you of the things you have always rejected in me: my high-strung ideas that the teachers don't fail to bring down to size, my dumb, childish mistakes like putting metal in the microwave, and you don't know if deep inside those things do charm you (for you once truly were, in its complete sense, in love with me) or if they are turn-offs, because there is no depth to your soul anymore. You know that we are inescapably connected; you feel it when we laugh, in spite of ourselves, at the same joke, or when we still manage to read each other's minds.

You know we are two sides of the same coin. You may be smaller, and thinner, and know how to dance, you may have never doubted your roots, or your loveability, but you are chaotic in a similar, pure and tormented, girly and sexless, contradictory way. You would never write about me though, and you know I would hate writing about you too, recognizing this "thing" that unites us intsead of trying to forget it, ignore it, deny it. You are over it, you believe. You always thought I was the crazy one, the erratic one, the impulsive one. Monstrous even. Yes, monstrous. But you are allured by my taste, my style. A captivating monster. You think I am too much woman for mankind, but not because I am the feminine ideal taken to the extreme, but because I am literally TOO MUCH WOMAN, too many thoughts, too much breast and belly and legs, too much face and cheeks, too many senseless words. You shrink at the comparison to yourself, and know that I have shown you sides of yourself unexplored, possibilities of being that in another scenario, you would have been curious about, and would have undoubtedly befriended me, and you know in another life we would have been intimate friends, and you hate fate for punishing you by showing you, through quick flashes of coincidence and unsought for encounters, pieces of the person you have missed, of the person who will not figure in your life as a friend, but as a rival.

I am the poet of self-consciousness. When I am with you, I don't see you. I see a variation of me in your eyes, in your thoughts that permeate into my subconscious, and from that image I can make out yours, like a shadow. I could write about you, through the ways I feel I am seen when I am with you (from my family, to the woman on the subway) and fill volumes, volumes that would make up a cubist self-portrait, without ever really talking about myself. A self-portrait in which I would be the object, but not the subject.