Halloween is a way of life!

People like to believe Halloween is a holiday. A fleeting night of mischief where they can wear plastic fangs, throw fake cobwebs in the corner, and pretend they’re dangerous. It’s adorable. Like watching a kitten hiss at a pit viper. For me, Halloween is not an event. It’s an operating system. It runs in the background of every thought, every conversation, every silent wish that maybe today the ground will open up and swallow someone irritating.

“Normal people” live in seasonal denial, believing October belongs to pumpkins, November to turkey, December to tinsel. I see no reason to rotate my obsessions. My pumpkins rot gracefully on the porch, their collapsing faces a reminder of the fleeting nature of flesh. My skeletons stay up year-round, watching from the corners, judging everyone who dares knock on my door. You call it laziness. I call it a commitment to authenticity.

My neighbors think I’m strange. Which is flattering. If they thought I was normal, I’d be concerned. The woman across the street once asked if my front yard gravestones were “real.” I said, “Not yet,” and closed the door.

Halloween is the one night the rest of the world catches up to me. They dress up, smear on fake blood, and feel thrillingly wicked for three whole hours before they go home and scrub it all off. I don’t take off my Halloween. I wear it, the way some people wear pearls or judgmental facial expressions. When I walk into a room, the air temperature drops three degrees. The lighting dims. Babies cry. Small dogs hide under furniture. And yet, people keep inviting me to parties. It’s almost sweet, in a slow-motion-train-wreck way.

Every day starts the same — black coffee so bitter it could dissolve holy water. Candles lit in the corners, more for the shadows than for me. A silent inventory of who might have wronged me in the last 24 hours. I walk outside in my usual black dress, my hair a silent curtain of threat, and the world parts around me. It’s not fear exactly — it’s the deep, primal knowledge that I would not flinch if they suddenly combusted.

Halloween is not about candy or costumes. It’s about remembering that beneath your pastel cardigans and social niceties, you are mortal. It’s about acknowledging that the veil is thin every day, if you just bother to look. It’s about embracing the fact that some of us feel more at home in a graveyard than in a brunch café. And while you’re out there packing up your fake tombstones and boxing up your rubber bats, I’m still here. Waiting. Watching. And counting the days until you realize that October never left — you just stopped paying attention.

Halloween is a way of life.

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