Halloween Sad is different than Christmas Day Sad. It’s different than New Year’s Eve, and Labor Day Sad. It’s just enough time and not any at all. It’s over before it begins. You don’t endure it like other holidays. You watch it fall away. Then it’s winter. And before you know it, it’s Halloween again. Since I was a kid, I’ve loved this day the most out of any other day. The sunlight, the smell. Halloween has a smell! Don’t deny it. If I could melt Halloween down and let it simmer like a stew, I’d sip it slowly every day. Little by little.
But even as a child, I would panic when I saw the light turn late and disappear. When the night would come and go. The year was over. Thanksgiving, the holidays, they’d come, sure. But for me, the year was over. Never enough time. The rotation of the Earth sped up. I would age a year in one day. I’ve been old since I was born. Not an Old Soul, don’t worry. I’ve never been called one by someone else, and more importantly, I’ve never called myself one. That’s a relief. Old Soul kids grow up to be annoying and mean. I’m annoying but I’m not mean.
I stopped trick-or-treating after 7th grade; I was one of the last kids in my grade to stop. I started crying around 6 pm, after my pillowcase was mostly filled with candy. My best friend Matt listened to me. He was patient and used to it. I knew we were almost in high school and couldn’t trick-or-treat any more. I was flirting with Weird Kid. Before I was just invisible and only mildly bullied when I appeared out of the fog, but I didn’t want to be Weird. You don’t come back from that. I was getting close. The night before, a boy I was on the swim team with and who was mostly civil towards me had called me a faggot. He and his friends saw me and my friends out throwing toilet paper in some trees near his house. It was Mischief Night. That’s what we call October 30th in New Jersey. Semi-sanctioned vandalism.
My co-swimmer and his friends, the Cool Boys of my grade who enjoyed light arson and fingering girls, ran by us. They weren’t partaking. They didn’t need to. That wasn’t cool. They would skip right to drinking on the golf course, or near the town pond or in the woods. They didn’t need to TP hedges and oak trees. They were just out surveying. Keeping watch for kids like me and my friends to chase. They all had older siblings who were cool, too. Some had left for college, already, or beyond. Some were still in high school. Some were local legends. Perennially Popular. My older sister wasn’t popular. I didn’t stand a chance.
“James?” I asked.
“Faggot?” he asked as their crew of Arson-Fingerers ran at us, then rounded the corner and disappeared into the night.
I couldn’t argue with him. It was official, even then: I’ve always been and always will be a Halloween Faggot. I didn’t need James to tell me. I already knew.
I’ve had to whittle my Samhain Faggotry down a bit in recent years. This is a choice. This is survival. I spread it out over the year instead of one day, one weekend. A sprinkling. I can’t condense it into 48 hours. It makes me too sad because it hurts. It hurts to be sober on Halloween. I guess I shouldn’t say that out loud, but it’s the truth. October 31st, above any other day, was my day to purify. To extinguish myself without expiring. To rocket myself to the veil, which is lifted any way on Halloween, but to reach that border between this world and the next, without passing into it. This was my absolution. This was how I atoned. Halloween was my New Year. I would hurl myself into the bonfire with the livestock and be offered up to the gods for a good harvest. I would do cocaine and MDMA and drink 15-38 beers till November 1st and then go home with a guy who turned out to be a foreskin activist and then wake up in a hamburger costume and walk to a bodega to buy lemon gatorade.
Now I flip through Instagram and see the gays dress like memes and go to raves and clank their hip bones together while I go to a party and Uber home at 10 PM and feel relieved and out of shape. Even though I’m not feeling my heart rattle while trying not to shit at a gay bar because I did too much blow, I get to go to sleep. I get to wake up and have a receding hairline. I can have a little Halloween every day if I want. That’s what real Halloween Faggots do. They keep it going year-round. I can do that. I don’t need to die.
(Photo of me dressed like a meme)
Calling tech bros "arson fingerers" from now on. Love you.
You're a remarkable writer <3