So here we are again, my least favorite time of year. Some of you are like, wait, what, she doesn’t like free candy? I don’t mind free candy but I’m neither trick or treating age nor mom of trick or treaters age. I’m old and so Halloween is a gigantic reminder that scary dolls name Annabelle and Poltergeists that suck you into the television, are going to be around for the fucking entire month. Oh sure, you like a good scare once in a while to remind you that you are alive. But come on, that’s what rollercoasters and almost choking to death is for. This stupid holiday is not a reminder to me that I should be thankful to alive, it is more of “Fucking Assholes Wanting to Scare me are around every corner!”

When did this madness begin, you are probably wondering? Let me tell you, it was childhood. My brothers and their friends may have taken this God for saken holiday too far. They would be out (its the seventies and eighties so that means hanging out at the mall) and I would be home alone hanging out with the dog, my only faithful companion. My sister may have been home or she may have been cooler than me and had friends and things to do *you decide which! I am in my living room choreographing the electric slide (you don’t know, I could have) and all of a sudden someone would knock on our front door. No one used our front door, which is hilarious because I’m a grown ass adult and SAME, a different front door, but yeah no one uses it, so basically its the pizza door!

In fact our front doo, from my childhood, involved moving things out of the way to answer it. There I am in my leotard, which is weird because I am home alone and not going to dance, moving things out of the way to answer the door. The Front Door, the scariest of all doors, because no one uses it. I finally get whatever was in front of the door out of the way and open the wooden door but leaving the glass door barrier locked in case it is someone nefarious. But I look out and there is not a soul to be seen. I go back to my choreographing Thriller….(again you don’t know, I may have been brilliant and there were no cell phones to capture my amazing choreographing talents) and there is a knock on the door, the front door. I look at the dog and the dog could give two shits about someone knocking on my front door. I take that as a sign that all is well. I walk over to the door and again no one is there. I go back to choreographing footloose (haha, I was literally not choreographing footloose, our living room was not that big) this is when I hear someone rustling in the bushes. I turn off the lights to pretend I’m not home. I know its too late for this but maybe they think I ran out to buy some milk, as a child and in my leotard. As I am sitting in the dark with the dog I decide I should check on what was rustling in the bushes, it could be my cat. I look out and there is some fucking creep sitting in my bushes. I am sickened with fear. I crawl over to the door to make certain that it is locked. It was. I then crawl to the kitchen to the back door to make sure it was locked, it wasn’t, because it never was. There were a hundred people that lived in our house, a locked door would have been mayhem. I reach up to the handle and lock it. As I do there was some sort of zombie ghoul peeking in the top window.

Just as I was crawling to the safety of my bedroom to hide and hyperventilate and piss my pants probably, I had to go past the basement door to get there. The basement door flings open and there is the most terrifying face I have ever seen. He reaches out and grabs my stocking feet. I pull my foot all the way in my tights, certain that I can Houdini my way out of them, when I hear laughter. Not just any laughter, but asshole brother and friends laughter. They reach up to take off their Halloween masks and that is the most single terrifying motion a person can do to me to this day, I was certain that this was going to be the day that I finally learn the true identity of my brothers and they were going to be even more horrible underneath the halloween masks that they were wearing. But nope just their naturally beautiful faces with their gorgeous blue eyes and their wonderful laughter ringing out.

I stand up and leave go to put real clothes on because I am suddenly aware that I am being weird and I don’t want to be caught in the act of weirdness. I am changing in my room and I hear my brothers and their friends laughing at how scared I was. I am crying in my room and changing. I finally get some composure and I go out and try to act as if all is well. However this is when the worst of it happened. They were all doing the choreography (the electric slide probably, haha) and mocking my weirdness. My, home alone, weirdness! UMMMMM! Excuse me, that was not ready for the stage yet, you cannot pick on me for my unrefined choreography. So needless to say Halloween is not my favorite holiday. I don’t need your free candy, I know where they sell it. Also Santa brings a new batch at Christmas anyway.

Moral of my story: I don’t blame my brothers for my fear that was all on me. My imagination was way more terrifying than anything they were ever going to do to me. I dabbled with the idea of putting my imaginations in a horror book but I would be more afraid with people mocking that it wasn’t that terrifying. My imagination has been frightening me for years, I couldn’t handle the idea that someone reading my book and thinking that unicorn was not that scary even if it had red eyes and a lion’s mouth. Any way, I guess what I am saying is that I am most afraid of judgement and not being accepted. I am also afraid of many other things but they aren’t real. Trick or Treat? I chose Treat, Always the Treat!