A Love Letter to the Vampire by Ari Ralph 

Ari Ralph

Ari Ralph is a queer, crip, South African transdisciplinary artist, activist, archivist, researcher, community programmer, and writer. Their artistic practice is rooted in non-linear forms of narration and vulnerability, with a focus on writing, textiles, audio-visual media, and sculpture as mediums. They work with social critiques and visual narratives, specifically within discourses of race, queerness, grief, and identity, interrogating ways to hold and express these critiques and engage with them with understanding, sensitivity and intersectionality.

Ari Ralph @trashycreations

A Love Letter to the Vampire by Ari Ralph 

My Dear Vampire, I will not address you by any one name as you have so many, will not insult your immortal nature by confining you to one name, one word, one sound. This is a love letter, a monstrous need to know more. I am so hungry my dear. Hungry for care, for working limbs and a healthy brain. Hungry for something normative, for a functionality that neither of us will be afforded. Your hungers are different, simpler at first glance, you salivate for blood, for companionship. Oh how I wish to live in the same shadow as you, spoon in your coffin and forgo daylight. But you are not that simple. Your hungers extend deeper. You are casted out, and I, an outcast. I have been wishing to speak to you of late, oh how I wish to bury my face into your neck, to wrap my arms around you and tell you that your monstrousness is wonderful, that I am monstrous in the same way. We are very similar, you and I, drained, draining, lost, debilitated, morphing, eternally uncomfortable. I’m sorry that your name has been smeared. That the cruelties of fascist tongues have named you a parasite, named you less than, unworthy, overrefined, blood thirsty. I’m sorry that no-one understands your motives, that you have been whitewashed, explained as an old man in a big castle decapitating younger men in smaller castles. That you prey on young virgins and lust for moral destruction. That you are a carcinogen, keeper of contagious blood, wanting to contaminate those around you for your own gain. I know that this is just one version of you, the version that is easiest to understand, to name you evil and violent, to keep you isolated, to close the conversation, to simplify your motives.  I dream of you nightly but you are never after my blood, my body, my purity. We are friends, holding hands and drinking tea at a kitchen island that I will never afford. We talk for hours, we braid each others hair and recite the words of Hedva as hymns. You finally share your shadow with me and I have never felt so seen. I know you’re not a romantic, I guess we can’t have everything in common. I know you do not value flowers as I do, but you talk to the trees. When you swim in those early navy hours of the day I watch you become the water, disintegrate and fizzle from your body and reduced to salt granules, a part of a new body of water, finally free to morph, to live in flux. I’m sorry you cannot do this with fire, its flames too certain for those who are ever changing. I miss you when you do not visit me during my brief hours of rest. My morethan-human friend, my crip companion, the body of my mind. I believe we have been floating towards each other for many lifetimes now. We keep missing each other, which makes sense as we both live within our own ever spiralling versions of time, our mortalities never syncing up. 

Yours forever,  Ari