Sylvian Breker

Hi, my name is [redacted], and I’m a proudly recover¬ing Twilight fan. In my lukewarm defense, when the “saga” came out, I was at the perfect age to consume it, to genu¬inely and thoroughly enjoy it. I was a teenage girl, I was the target audience, and I gotta tell you: I fell for Edward all-dark-and-dangerous Cullen, and I fell for him hard. Once the hype died out and the tides turned, Twilight became my guilty pleasure; I wouldn’t even openly tell people that I had ever liked it at all. But for longer than I care to admit, I looked for Edward Cullen—I looked for him in fiction, I looked for him in fanfic, I looked for him in high school, in college, in chat rooms and dating apps. My God, did I have a type, an Edward-shaped type, and wouldn’t you know it, my type just so happened to filter through some real-life vampires.
That being said, Twilight was perhaps the book that really got me hooked on books, and for that, I’m eternally grateful to Mrs. Meyer. Books are the closest thing to real magic we have in this world—they embed thoughts from one mind into thousands, millions, billions of others; they let us travel through time and space; they build entire uni¬verses for us to crawl into; they enrich us with knowledge; they shape the fabric of reality; they shape ideas and values and our view of the world. So what’s to say they wouldn’t also shape our expectations, our ideals, and our search for real, human connections?
To all my fellow—proud or closeted—Twilight fans out there, let us enjoy our fictional vampires, insofar as they re¬main respectfully confined in the world of fiction.