Home For Halloween//October 21st, 2023

I saw a movie once; I think it was some variation of Barbie. In this movie a fairy realm existed, all the time, invisible to the naked eye. Only when the characters wore special glasses, could they see the true magic around them, the magic that the fairies saw every day without effort.

I don't know when or why I watched this movie, I'm thinking I may have been babysitting a child, likely the niece of my ex, but I can tell you it's always made me think of Halloween, and the things I've struggled to put into words for years and years.

I went for a walk yesterday, and the thing that struck me so hard about the world around me was the sudden familiarity of it. I think a lot about a walk I took on October 29th of last year, and the sights I saw. Every walk or drive I took between then and now, I saw the echoes of these creatures and these sights. The residual feeling of something that was and would eventually be again. I don't know if other people's Halloween decorations ever fully go away for me, strange as it may sound. I see a "for sale" sign on a house and instantly think of which decorations I won't be seeing the following October. It's just how I've always been.

But there's almost a strangeness to seeing them there again, the following year, physically and in the "flesh", or whatever you'd call it. As if the world opens its eyes again to something I can see all year round. I ask myself constantly, why it's only okay for such a brief period of time, while I feel their absence in the dead of winter and the oppressive heat of summer. I wait, longingly, for them to come back, yet somehow it feels like they never left.

Perhaps I truly am some alien in this world, who's truly only ever at home for Halloween.

October 29th, 2022

October 20th, 2023

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