One year when I was much younger, around middle school age, I think, I was out trick-or-treating and stumbled upon a house whose front porch was adorned with orange lights. It sounds so commonplace now, but back then, in the late 90s or early 2000s, whichever it was, huge Halloween displays with bright lights and things like that, weren't really a thing yet.
I remember walking up the stairs to that doorway, and feeling so enchanted. Like I was in the middle of a jack o'lantern, or some other realm entirely.
No one answered the door there; I assume they were probably out trick-or-treating with their own children, but I couldn't help but linger. I remember my aunt, down in the driveway, trying to wave me back, telling me I wasn't going to get any candy there.
And I knew that. I just didn't want to leave.
Somehow it just felt right for me to be standing within those lights. I felt like my truest self there, somehow, like I was right where I was supposed to be.
It was the epitome of Halloween to me, back then, and an experience I never forgot. I wrote a huge passage about it in a long-gone journal that I wish I still had. The feeling of being under those lights, almost being cradled and supported by Halloween itself, weighs heavily on my soul even now, at least twenty-five years later.
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This past Halloween, I wandered through Tarrytown, adjacent to Sleepy Hollow, among trick-or-treaters and dog walkers and others just trying to take it all in.
I stumbled upon a house adorned with many types of pumpkin creatures; decorations that looked like beings from the realm I probably should have been born in. I had seen this house once, years ago, in the daytime, and had never quite been able to find it again at night. It was my greatest delight to finally experience it this year.
I felt fulfilled, having found that house, and very much reminded of the child I used to be, always most exhilarated around Halloween decorations, never quite able to express the deep emotional reactions she'd have to seeing such things.
It's a difficult thing to explain, that something that the vast majority of people consider 'seasonal', and move on from without a word when the morning comes and brings with it an entirely new month, the month of pre-Christmas, somehow feels like the only reason your heart continues to beat.
But that's how it is. How it's always been.
And this past Halloween night, a night that feels like moments and years ago all at once, as it got later and colder and we headed back to the car, about to put another October 31st in the books, we passed by that pumpkin house again.
I took a good, long look at it in those final moments, and I thought of myself standing under those orange lights all those years ago. How I didn't want to leave, despite knowing nothing would come from me continuing to stand there. Despite knowing that I had to leave, eventually.
In that moment, all I wanted in the world was to run into that pumpkin scene. I envisioned it so perfectly from my place across the street; just bolting over there, begging the tallest pumpkin man to save me from the fate of another November 1st morn. In that moment it wasn't a Halloween display, but a very real scene that I wanted to disappear into, to be sucked up inside.
Though I knew there was no way to make this happen, it took everything in me to hold myself back and not go running into the arms of the only true salvation I've ever known.
This is the picture I took in that exact moment. I think maybe I took the camera out to give myself something to do; to stop myself from bolting.
I still wish I was inside this picture, a memory of a decoration not to be seen again until next year, rather than out here in a world that will never understand.
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