The Tyranny Of Beauty (Memoirs of a Siren)

Beautiful Death

December,  2013

Hear! Both young and old!
Of my stories that's been forever told.

A reaper, claiming what is not mine.
My comrade is death, joined with time.

I walk not by day, nor at night.
Stop searching, for I am absent from sight.

I'm a riddle, yet a very simple thing.
I rule destruction, and to death I am queen.

I do not seek fame. My desire is only you.
Go ahead, seek fortune. He answers to me too.

I live in pleasure traps of passion and vice.
I master pride. I am the predator of life.

Few have seen my cold, pretty face.
For I am never subject to time or space.

Not a siren, I'm the silent enemy of man.
Walk carefully. It's hard to escape my hand.

The unenlightened live unaware that I am your worst enemy;
You never knew, so I tell you now. My name is Vanity.

You got it wrapped up in a nice entertaining package, but it took me four centuries to learn what I now teach. It's being transferred to you in a few verses. How amazing is that? You may think I'm arrogant, and perhaps there is a bit of truth to it. It's not that I don't care, but it doesn't matter anymore. At the end of four hundred long years of life, death is as real for me as it is for you.

Don't think of it as a bad thing. Most of you have not yet embraced the beauty in death because you cherish the wrong things in life. After living so long, the first thing you learn is what pleasure and wealth cannot give you. They deceive you; make you long to forever experience the lovely things of life...and those very things become the tyrant you serve, never finding peace. The ultimate slave master is the quest for what you perceive to be beautiful things. The ultimate peace is the discovery of true beauty.

I know most of you have heard the term "beautiful death", but very few really know the meaning. It is so much more than the cliché it has become for so many, for so long. Listen to me. Respect the words I you are about to read because most will never understand them and they are priceless. Death is beautiful when you choose how and when you die because you honor something greater than yourself.

when you choose how and when you die
because you honor something
greater than yourself...

because you honor something
greater than yourself...

greater than yourself...

I will never see the beautiful death I've desired all my Nosferaturian life. I've dreamt dreams of it; the only thing I still entertain as a childlike fantasy. I told myself so many times all of the inner violence with my conscious was worth the pain because in the end, there is beautiful death. Dying for something that was greater than I.

That day never came. I stand now at deaths door for the opposite reason. I choose death not because I value something greater than myself, but because I simply want my personal torment to end. It is selfishness that drives me to my death. Perhaps I was never brave enough. Perhaps that honor wasn't meant for me to have.

Perhaps, in all of my knowledge, wisdom and experience, I have fallen short or failed to learn something to know better than the choice I have made. Perhaps in my vague memories of my life I have suppressed some evil deed that has taken my right to have my beautiful death. I've given up asking why. It doesn't matter anymore. So I take to my grave all that I have learned and executed and hope that somehow, it is enough for peace.

April, 2013

There once was a man I loved very, very deeply. Not my mortal husband. Not my master. A man I met many years later. I was 147 years old. I was hunting in China as I often did. It was one of my favorite countries for hunting. He was a simple young man. When I first laid eyes on him, I wanted to consume him with a driving passion. The very thought of him aroused me. I've never wanted to feed from a man that badly. It was something about his energy.