The Music Lover

I can still remember the first time I tasted her blood. It was sweet like candy, and since she had no heartbeat, and her lungs never filled with air, there was no oxygen in that blood. It was blue. Blue like the sky on a clear summer morning. She was beautiful. Hair as black as night with eyes and lips to match. A Goth girl in black and gray corsets with torn fishnets and shiny leather boots. I would always see her at shows and concerts, standing idly in the background, gently swaying to the music. When I first approached her I was timid. She was just so gorgeous, and how could I, this lonely music geek possibly even talk to this beautiful, dark goddess. But she was nice and sweet to me, her eyes lighting up as I awkwardly made my way to her. “Hey, I’ve seen you around,” she said, and we naturally fell into a conversation about music. She knew everything about every genre of music: jazz, classical, swing, blues, rock-a-billy, punk. All of it. And she spoke with such authority. When she first mentioned seeing the Doors and dating Jim Morrison I thought it was a joke. She was just fucking with me. Later I discovered it was all true. Everything she knew about music she learned firsthand. She was there for it all. She was surprisingly sweet and gentle the first time we made love. It was in the back of my van, after a Marilyn Manson concert, the moonlight streaming in through the windshield to illuminate her pale face and glistening lips. She fed off of me, took me to the brink, but stopped. “You are a music lover, too,” she explained. “I will give this gift to you so that you can go on through the ages and listen to the greats as I have.” That is when she opened her neck with her razor sharp fingernails and let me feast on that sweet blue blood. I never saw her again and sometimes the loneliness is unbearable. How I wish I could be held in those cold lifeless arms just one more time. Feel her cool black lips against mine. Taste that sweet, sweet blood. The next day, when the sun shown down on me and my skin burned, blistered and began to smoke, when the terrible, awful nagging hunger for fresh human blood filled me, in that moment everything became clear. I knew I could never go back.