Fear is a vampire

There are days when I can feel it, pressing against the length of my back.

My neck tingles the way it would when I’d remember vampires just before bed and pull the sheet around me, tucking it in at my nape.  Then I would eventually pull my head under too, pinning the fabric at all my edges and across my skull, taut, so that the sheet hovered above me an inch or so, giving me room to echo my breath back at me.  

My eyes would adjust in the dark and cast their own light into the fort I had constructed;
body sized and coffin-shaped.  Sometimes this would make it worse, and I could feel my heart thump against the space; and I would struggle in my stillness until it would go away or exhaustion took me. 

In thirty years I have never seen a vampire.  

At night, sometimes I still pull the sheets taut the same way I did then, to feel the company of my breath in my own face and invite in the fear. I want to experience the belief and danger of then and contrast it against the tepid anguish of today; the manufactured reasons and distractions I give myself to block out the tingle in my neck. 

The muse wants to suck my blood.

But I would rather cut my own self with the searing edge of laundry and homework, and exist in the coffin of constant preoccupation.