Enraptured

So, how did I, despite my parents’ tireless work to correct their deviant child, become so fixated on the darker side of fantasy? Much of my blog bears evidence their toil was for naught, or better yet, consider what my mind would have become had they not affected what change they could. My earliest fixation was on ghosts, and I sought to catch a glance of them round every corner. I had a brief foray into daydreams of zombies, though they were never my favorite monster as a child, after watching commercials for Scooby Doo on Zombie Island; if memory serves, creating little zombies out of dots of green clay, I set them in pursuit of some other toy until my mother caught me and told me to play something else. Her reason was sound: I had nightmares.

Sometimes, it seemed, I’d wake up every night, the creatures of shadows—those forms only I could see—tormenting me. And I’d scream, and cry, and mom or dad would come. Don’t play with zombies, it will give you nightmares, was the message. My mind though, wouldn’t stop. I’d pretend I was a ghost haunting a mansion, imagine myself a skeletal figure gathering the dust of centuries cursed to never die, I played I was—how I have forgotten: I was a vampire, a werewolf, a zombies, I’m sure I played all of these. I played at them in the day, but couldn’t sleep at night.

And now, blessed with the autonomy of adulthood, I’ve timidly ventured into literary horror, discovering a certain admiration for what might be termed gothic. Boy, that’s a word with a varied etymology. I don’t mean the current black eyeliner, Hot Topic, Tim Burton—maybe I do mean Tim Burton—rock band meaning of the word, but the subset of the romantic movement: I mean Frankenstein and Dracula, I mean Edgar Allen Poe, or that is I hope to. You see, I’ve read little of Poe. I have a complete collection of his work at my disposal, and yet I’ve merely hopscotched through his poetry.

There is some part of me, something good parenting was powerless to weed out, that fell in love with my nightmares. Now, instead of staying up too afraid to sleep, I’m too engaged in some dark fantastic world to sleep, a world where the dead walk the earth, where goblins eat you, and where the hope in the sunrise is the only thing keeping you sane. Of Poe’s poetry, there’s one that stands out to me, Alone. Here, I think, whatever the author meant, he encapsulates my internal experience regarding this love of the dark.

Alone

By Edgar Allen Poe

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still—
From the torrent, or the fountain—
From the red cliff of the mountain—
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by—
From the thunder, and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view—