Soulstice: Luna's Dream. Lance Jr. Dow

daylight.

      Now our sunscreen is so good we get jobs of almost any kind, live in homes like yours, go to your schools; enjoy the good life. Why live in the woods? Better to live like the Joneses and feed on the Joneses. Kind of like humans, who for a long time lived on farms with their very food sources, now, most humans just go to the grocery store and pick up food in neat little packages. No mess, no fuss.

      I don’t mind living amongst humans. I’m not a fan of humans themselves per se, but I love their music, and my cool retro bike and the planet itself. So your causes are my causes. Peace, love, harmony. It makes it all easier for both of us.

      And yes, boys are slowly coming into the picture. There are not as many to choose from within the vampire ranks. Humans are strictly off-limits… forbidden. It’s against “the code.” Really against the code. No fraternizing with a human and worse; falling in love with a human.

      I’ve got all the young teen girl things going on. All the changes happening with my body, my vampire hormones, school. Deciding what I want to do for a job some day. Hey, our food is free, but there’s no free lunch if you want a nice home, a nice car, TV, internet, iPods and iPhones. We gotta work for those hot concert tickets too.

      I’m into planet-related causes. Global warming and pollution affects us too. If humans are affected, we’re affected. I want a clean planet too. I love nature, especially the ocean and forests and all they have to offer. So I’m into it… saving the planet. Mother Earth. I love her. But let me be clear. Mother Earth is not God. It’s the vessel he gave us to ride the universe while we prove to him we are worthy of the other ride; the long ride. He’s given us enough to judge him by with this vessel. I say the wonders of his vessel are never-ending. And the sea we’re traveling in-- even more wondrous. Imagine what waits for us.

      Yes, we are affected by the sun-- both the ultraviolet A and B rays penetrate our skin and mild exposure damages our blood cells. Depending on the length of this exposure, it will actually kill our blood cells outright. Kill enough and the remaining cells cannot carry the burden of supplying our organs with what they need to function causing them to shut down. If we have direct intense exposure to daytime sun, our skin and flesh will literally burn and burn away right down to the bone. Without immediate and special care, we die. So our sunscreen is very important to our lives. It has the opposite effect on human skin as it causes a kind of chemical burn. We have to be careful to conceal the sunscreen or certainly not get caught with it by a human. They say the formula is kept by our government in a secret location and that the secret ingredients are also secret. It would be hard, even impossible for humans to figure out what it is. But our government doesn’t want that Pandora’s Box cracked open-- ever. It is sold and dispensed by the government. See how close we are to your society. The thing we need the most, we get charged for!

      We still feed at night for the obvious predatory and secretive reasons. “The code” requires that we take all steps necessary to keep our existence a secret. Fact is, it’s just easier all the way around to do it under the cloak of darkness. It’s also when humans, for the most part; sleep. There’s nothing easier than taking someone asleep on the couch, recliner, or in bed. Mostly, our days are filled up with the same things yours are filled up with. So nights are when we hit the streets.

      Our lack of sun exposure does make us pale with almost a rosy or pink glow after feeding as fresh blood courses through our bodies. Our sunscreen, along with make-up products and tanning colorings, can keep us looking just like humans. But here again, some vampires shun these human trappings and go completely bare. But they have to stay indoors when the sun is out until it is gone from the horizon. These vampires are usually those who live by the Old World ways. They are our fundamentalists, so to speak. I think they are plain ‘ol creepy.

      One thing we can’t hide, unless we use sunglasses, is our eyes. During feeding and up to a half-hour (more or less), our eyes are shades of reds and pinks as blood is processed in our bodies. I mean the entire eye - there’s no hiding it. During feeding and in the first minutes thereafter, we really do look like demons. Luckily, my body processes blood quickly. So, in about fifteen minutes I’m fine to look at. It’ll look like I’m just tired (should you catch a glimpse of me).

      Vampires don’t record anything about anything. No writings. No recordings. It’s all against, the code. All information is solely passed verbally, or by watching other vampires, for as long as we’ve existed. Even though that existence goes back thousands and thousands of years—we only exist in the here and now.

      There’s a lot more to tell, but I’m going to lull for a little bit before I go out to feed. Lulling is our form of sleep. It’s a rest-state, which is a blankness, blackness, and nothingness. You just know you’re rested when you come out of it. We don’t dream. We can’t dream.

      I wish I could dream like humans. From what I’ve read and heard it’s like having a whole other life besides the one you live out every day. That’s so cool. I guess that it’s my dream to be able to dream. For now, it has to be just a hope. I hope, one day, I can dream.

      BEAUTIFUL MYSTERIES

      I love Imogen Heap! She’s a human yes, but she helps me touch so many feelings. And San Francisco band, The Cons. Very cool. Shhh… they’re my secret. Goodnight Gilbert… those boys are awesome. Don’t get me started with Dutch rock gods Within Temptation. Hours can go by on replay. Okay… and Green Day. I know they’re getting older, but I love their earlier stuff. Lastly, no one can deny that Nirvana still and will forever resonate. Put Nirvana on, especially on a drizzly overcast day and forget about everything else.

      And I so love drizzly or full-on rainy overcast days. It’s like total freedom. Free from sunscreens and the harmful rays of the sun. Cooling and soothing to the body and skin--- so comforting in a gray kind of way. Gray is good. Nothing feels overwhelmingly important on gray days. They just seem to glide effortlessly by. You feel like a piece of driftwood whose only job is to drift aimlessly along on a current of waves, or settle on a beach until the tide carries you out again.

      Sometimes I run with the deer. It’s so much fun as they stop cold and instantly change directions. It seems on a whim but actually it’s an evolutionary survival tactic to throw off possible attackers. I’m actually much, much faster than them now. It’s pretty cool being able to leave a ten-point buck in the dust.

      I kind of surprised myself last week. I experimented with running… a little naked. Okay, a lot naked. I was buckaroo banzai. But I was like ten miles out of the city, (if you can call Crescent City a city). It’s more like a town. A sleepy, sea-side town tucked between the Klamath and Smith rivers, hugged by Redwoods National Forests and the rugged northern Pacific coast.

      I’m glad my parents got permission to settle here. There’s a ratio of humans to vampires that our government tries to keep in place. They also try to set each vampire family’s limit of children according to that ratio and human population trends. It’s a rather complicated process, that also like the human-world, has its share of politics.

      Because of the favorable climate in Crescent City, we have a number of powerful vampire families living here. They live all to themselves in a gated community of estates in a northeast section at the edge of the city. There’s a micro-climate there, where a sunlight blocking mist stays almost year-round, and it’s the most comfortable place to live if you’re a vampire.

      So… back to my experimentation. It was raining really hard, so I had the forest to myself. The rain had just stopped when I started my run and it made the air in the forest come alive and a mist began to rise. It was like running in the clouds.

      While running, I got raked pretty well by some branches and thorny brambles opening cuts all over my body. Although the cuts all healed in a few minutes, at that moment the pain was definitely real.

      Yeah, we feel pain just like humans do except we are lucky that it diminishes and goes away with our super-fast healing. But who likes pain no matter how short? So I think my experimentation with naked running thing has run its course. But I can’t lie… it was fun. I felt so free. I’ll still swim naked. It’s the best feeling in the world and anybody that has done it will