calling this an outline because it's somewhat all over the place. still i wanted to release it into the world for october, and then revisit it later once i can make something better
i have long yearned to write about transgender vampiric body horror. but what story could i possibly tell? i am the static vampire, killing (myself) every day to survive immortality (and all i got was this lousy t-shirt).
the main character would have to be myself. could i put myself through nine circles of hell? could i even write a cathartic ending when i don't see one for myself? could i distance myself from misery and imagine a future? or would the story remain unresolved and unsatisfying? i don't want to write myself. (is this why i write analyses?)
and writing vampiric body horror is difficult. there is no fanfare of sinews and bones, only the realization of sudden permanence.
have you considered the constant decay? the human sheds hair, and shaves, and clips their nails. i don't think vampires ever have to clean their bathrooms.
the vampire is a marble statue but how must if feel like to not fear being immortalized in an unfinished state? trapped in a pristine temple, too beautiful to deface. perhaps not having a reflection is for the best. for the transexual vampire, it isn't just the pain of dysphoria but the helplessness of it all.
every night the vampire bites off their tits. every day they grow back in their sleep. (this isn't a metaphor, just a slice of vampiric misery).
the vampire is driven by two needs: thirst and violence. no. what i mean is the vampire knows only two things (or so they believe): thirst and violence. the vampire's certainty is they'll never be fully quenched.
and so the vampire can only think of themself as a creature of violence. they have to kill to quench their thirst and they have to do it every day, forever. this is what the vampire knows about themself: thirst and violence.
the tragedy of the vampire is their treadmill-unlife. the vampire kills to drink and then drinks to unlive and kill another night. the vampire can't see their future, for it is the same as their present. the world changes during the day, as they sleep, where they cannot go, but for the vampire there remains thirst and violence.
in yearning for blood, what the vampire, in their death, truly desires is life. living vicariously through the warmth that animates another, a small taste of a future, now cut short. the vampire is a monster forbidden even the small relief of a monstrous form. a monster forced to inhabit a human body — a body less than human because it can't be changed. the vampire's body is completely dead and out of their hands.
(at least the vampire is free to revolt against their own body without consequence, and in that way they are lucky. but better would be to not need to revolt, to at least have the hope of eventually changing.)
but i am getting ahead of myself. before there is the vampire, there is the human, and the transformation. it's odd to call it so; it's a quiet death and then eternity. there is the pain of the bite, but what else? does the skin feel suddenly taut and stiff, do the guts twist against themselves, lost and useless, does the throat close off, the body allergic to itself, straining to bloat and decompose, does the vampire feel inside a haunted house, lonely inside themselves, now an alien ecosystem? does anyone else even notice the change?
who is the beautiful androgyne-vampire?
they never had a chance. they never had a choice. they never had agency. it's the tragedy of a life cut short, isn't it? even if they're not young. stasis and transition are at odds with each other.