Noctámbula (English Version)

Part 1

At 13 years old a kid is naive, and he starts to believe that he knows everything, that he can achieve it all, even if deep inside he knows true. At that sweet age he doesn't grasp the crudeness of the world, it's all nebulous, and its full weight tearing one's soul doesn't come yet. I was very naive, but I had been obsessed for so long, as if all my short life I had been fascinated by it, and at 13 years old, I was an ambitious connoisseur, far from being a scholar, but in my arrogance, I was the closest thing I knew to one.

Allow me to explain.

My mom passed away when I was a toddler; my dad then turned into a workaholic, to the point that we turned into strangers. Without a responsible adult (or other relatives who wanted to take care of me), I blame my twisted breeding to my uncles, Fer and Elias, the youngest siblings of my father, who lived with us. Both were teenager when I was born, and at their own way they were also a little crazy, but were good to me.

I can't pinpoint the exact moment that blew the fuse: a movie in the living room at 4, a costume party at 6; maybe a story at 3... the point is that, when they discovered my fascination, they fed it. And when I was old enough to provide it for myself, they didn't avert it, and let me be. They didn't see it as something bad, because it was a harmless way to deal with my chronic insomniac fits. A movie, a book or two, what harm can they do to a girl who cannot sleep?

To make matters worse, I had a pretty solitary childhood: my always growing collection turned into my only friend, and my strange state of health, my eternal companion. My uncles were the closest thing I had to friends, but it wasn't the same, due to the age difference. My classmates wanted nothing to do with someone who spent most of the classes asleep, and when awake, only talked about horror movies. I had a fair share of extravagant nicknames in elementary school because of that (and that, I ain't gonna mention here).

Regarding my healt,h there wasn't much to do. After many laboratory tests and an awkward visit to a neurologist, doctors finally came to tell my dad (to whom the theme was more a nuisance than anything else), that my circadian rhythm was abnormal, and that with some luck, in my teens it could be controllable. But outside of having the sleep Schedule of an owl, my health was stable overall, which at least made my dad place me in an evening class, which helped my school life become more tolerable.

Isolated by my peers and always awake by the moonlight, I started to fill my solitude with books and movies, with a topic that repeated itself until it turned into a constant... No one seemed to be scandalized by a subject so dark, so within range of a child, or seemed to care about possible repercussions from the contact (now, I think it wasn't the wisest thing); on the contrary, my uncles used to tell how full of light my face turned with the sole mention of it. Which was, then, this subject that had me so engrossed, you may ask? Was it ghosts? Witches, maybe? No, sir. I only had eyes for vampires...

One could think that without adult supervision, with a distant father in every sense, at the mercy of pop culture and horror literature, a lonely girl could turn into a taciturn being, or a cranky sociopath; on the contrary, without more influence than fantasy to inflame my active imagination, the only resulting oddity was just basically being a nerd of a peculiar topic, with so many things to tell...and no one who wanted to listen.

My collection, thus, became my refuge, and the obsession of my short life. Of course, part of this was built with the sponsorship of my uncles, and mostly, from my dad, who tried to compensate his absence in the only way he could. I can proudly say that at 13, my collection was an enviable one, yet still childish, and that harsh truth only made me want more...