A New Year Of Perpetual October//October 93rd, 2022

 What is a calendar, anyway?

It’s just a series of tiny little paper boxes, but people treat them as if they are of the utmost importance. 

It’s become almost a joke, among most people that you know. Everyone always asking what your plans are for whichever holiday, and you replying that you don’t really care what you do; it’s just another day. You’ve come to sort of lean into it, in almost a Wednesday Addams-ish type way, but you know that very few people would actually understand how you really feel.

New Year’s is probably the holiday that baffles you most of all. People act as though midnight, as December thirty-first turns into January first, is some sort of magical transition time when suddenly, everything changes. Yet every year, January comes, and most things stay the same. Life can change, or stay the same, for that matter, no matter what the calendar says. Nothing is guaranteed to change just because it’s midnight on January first, or guaranteed to not change just because it’s some random Tuesday in the middle of June. Calendars aren’t magic, and celebrating putting up a new one just seems silly to you.

There’s only one day on the calendar that’s ever seemed like magic to you: October thirty-first. And, after years and years of feeling forced to store it away with the coming of November, you finally decided, one year, to just keep it going. Who cares what the little paper boxes say? Isn’t society always preaching for us to ‘choose happiness’? Your happiness comes in celebrating perpetual October. The actual calendar has become something you barely give a second thought, and you feel like you’re a better person for it. Why should you have to pack away the things that make you feel the most like yourself, just because a paper grid tells you it’s not the time?

On the morning of that baffling holiday known as New Year’s Day, you look around outside. 

“You see? Nothing has really changed,” you tell the rotting pumpkins. “Life goes on, as it always does.”

You look over the pumpkins, and up at the dry, dead leaves still clinging desperately to their trees, as if they, too, are trying to live in perpetual October, and suddenly, you hear a noise, as if someone is running through the woods.

It’s hard to make out, but you think you catch a glimpse of orange and brown passing by.

A voice comes into your head, like a telepathic ghost:

“THIS Halloween is on the way! Remember the rules!”

You smile down at the rotting pumpkins.

“Ah, yes,” you tell them. “One thing DOES change today: At last, we can finally, once again, say THIS Halloween, as opposed to NEXT.”

And with a new shadow of hope, you head into the layman’s “new year”, knowing it won’t be terribly long until the rest of the world catches up to you once again.