Blue Dress Hot Mess

I suddenly felt old.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not old. But, as I sat there in my see-through dress with a bloody scar tattooed to my cheek and a black cauldron burping purple smoke in the centre of the table, I suddenly realised that I have known these people for three years; we are not eighteen anymore; and we are adults, going about with our separate lives, each of us surprisingly, staggeringly, wide-eyed in the light of adult-ing. We have Grown Up (Peter Pan would curse). Our witches hats and cat ears were useless disguise, costume. We wore them with purpose, for a purpose — they no longer represented who we were (when I was little, I simply was a cat for Halloween; I became one, and everyone accepted it. Now, I was simply ‘Cathy’ for the night, a ghost from Wuthering Heights, knocking at the window of her future while shivering on the sill of her past. While it sounds romantic, it’s actually rather cold).

If it did not hit me like a ton of bricks, the feeling that accompanied this knowledge descended quickly, like the weight of a rucksack I’d just swung onto my shoulders. I adjusted the straps, wriggling to make the weight sit more evenly, to share the burden over my two shoulders, to make the rucksack cling comfortably to my back like a baby gorilla. Now that it has sat there for a day, I no longer recognise its weight as new. After all, it was to be expected; we were always going to grow up; I haven’t, in reality, been eighteen for years, and twenty-one is not exactly old. But now I have a rucksack; and that feels significant.

Childhood is not a ghost but a memory. The teenage years are perhaps more ghoulish, but that is a growing phase, when one feels alien in one’s own changing skin, and adapts like a chameleon to one’s environment. I went to university wanting Life. I lived. Now, in my twenties, I know simply that I am living. Life is now, I don’t need to pursue it. The faces around the table – the teeth of my friend transformed into those of a vampire, the nose of another hooked and crooked like a witch, the face of the boy who, at eighteen, showed me the Life I had so wanted, painted now like the skeleton that he is in my closet.

The joke would be funny if the scar weren’t still bleeding. I guess the joke’s on me; somehow, though, with the weight of twenty-one and the ghost of eighteen on my shoulders, I feel better able to laugh at it. Ha ha. Happy Halloween.