#CQ Vampires or Fairies?

I was looking for inspiration. I started brainstorming. What could I blog about this week? Angels? No. Demons? No. Love? Death? Anti-heroes? Nope. I started typing “fairies” in a Google search, and I landed on “Fairies and Vampires” and the first link took me to a “Vampire Fairy Twilight Goth Emo Punk Sk8er Roleplay Gaming Social Network”. Too much? I’d say not enough!

I fell upon a few posts on http://www.fairiesvampires.com that reminded me of my tormented youth.

“go ahead, dress yourself up, paint yourself superior. does it make you feel better about who you are in the careening depths of your soul? go ahead, drink yourself blind, smoke until the thick cloud shadows you for good, does it make you feel like you belong? does it really make you forget? go ahead, kiss the wrong one, open up and let him tear you further. does it really make you feel safer, more loved? or does it send you spiraling further and further down into the crevasses of the truth? only to be hidden temporarily and frivolously with the shallowness of the day? with the suns decent and the destitute of only yourself do you examine yourself clearly? disintegrated by the demons that haunt the hushed minded.”

***

“Love is like a parasite that takes the life out of you. It slowly dries you out and leaves you a bitter shadow of your former self.”

***

“I just want someone in my life
who’s gonna say, put down the knife
you don’t need to bleed for me
I care and understand
the way you think and who you are
I’ll make you forget your broken past
I’ll ease the pain
let’s fix this broken heart
and what I’ll say is
let me do the same for you
and let me love you”

When I read the words posted on these walls, I felt the pain of a bleeding soul in search for spiritual healing. I sensed the everlasting void created by a maturing mind stuck in a child’s body. I remembered what it used to be like. The impatience to grow up mixed with the resistance to real adulthood. The rebellious attitude stalled by too much conformity. The overwhelming desire to express oneself. So yes, I dyed my hair purple, and then I bleached it. I wore weird clothes. Did I do much more than that? Not really.

When I was thirteen, I found truth in words and books. I read and I wrote. Poems, plays, novels that were as dark and as tormented as me. No make up. No piercings. No drinking and smoking, or partying until dawn. No, actually, these things happened much later for me.

My days in the darkness were solitary. I didn’t spend my time on social networks because they didn’t exist at the time. I didn’t share my angst with anyone. I didn’t write my morbid poetry on a wall and people left comments and pressed the “like” button. I lived my youth like an outcast. Today, all outcasts can find each other online and they’re not really outcasts anymore.

I wonder what it’d be like to be a teenager in 2012. Maybe I’d rule the internet by having over one hundred thousand followers on Twitter. But maybe endless online possibilities could lead me to an even darker path since I’d be sharing my angst with thousands of other kids also full of angst out there.

I’d be like all of them. Simply looking for a way out. Simply looking for love. The fantasy worlds of my youth wouldn’t mean anything unless my heart felt whole. And naturally, stories like Twilight and The Lord of the Rings would resonate with me with such intensity, I’d be all over sparkling vampires and magical evil rings for the rest of my days!

But has anything really changed since I became an adult? I find myself wanting more and more to go back to the feelings of my youth by reading and writing fantasy stories. It’s not reverting to a bad time of my life. It feels more like introspection in order to improve my understanding of everything in life.

I love words. I love stories. Reading poems written by angst ridden teens on a punk platform just brings me back to who I really am. A wild spirit. A creative mind. An untamed artist.

So just like Alice said: “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary-wise; what it is it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”

Break the rules. Think outside the box. Be yourself. Share your thoughts. Someone out there will want to read them. Vampires, fairies, none of them really matter. They only allow us to be whoever we want to be.