The Bitter Northerner

Thirty-three in October, which means I’ve been alive for thirty-three Halloweens, thirty-three times watching the world dress up as what it fears. This year all my neighbors have those projected ghosts on their houses, the kind that flicker and loop, the kind that aren’t real but also aren’t not real, if you know what I mean. I stand on my porch at dusk and watch them hover and I think about how we only make room for ghosts one month a year, as if the dead respect a calendar, as if they don’t live in us every single day.

October is the goth month, the dead month, the one where we’re all finally honest about what we carry. I was born into a season that knows something about endings. About the way leaves let go not because they want to but because holding on would kill the whole tree. The day I was born was during a cold snap, so cold that the windows frosted. I’ve always had a little bit of that chill in me. I don’t know if that’s true but I like the story. I like being born under the sign of thinning veils.

At the coffee shop they’re playing “Thriller” even though it’s only the fifth and someone my age, which is to say someone who should know better, is complaining about Christmas creep, about how holidays have lost their meaning. But I’m thinking about how Michael recorded that album at 24 and how he’s a ghost now too, how everyone who ever made us dance eventually becomes a memory we play at parties. How we are all just haunting each other in real time, leaving impressions, making people feel something even after we’ve left the room.

Thirty-three and I finally understand what someone meant when they said the dead don’t leave, they just get quieter. I hear them in songs that come on shuffle at impossible moments. In the way my friend laughs exactly like her mother who died when we were in high school. In October especially, when the air smells like smoke and dirt and something ending, I feel them all around me, not scary, not monsters, just the people I’ve loved who don’t get to be 33, who don’t get to stand on a porch watching fake ghosts projected on brick siding. Someone asked what I’m going to be for Halloween and I almost said haunted but that’s not a costume, that’s just what it means to have loved people, to have lived long enough to accumulate absences. Instead, I’ll probably just hand out candy to kids dressed as superheroes and princesses, kids who think ghosts are something you can take off at the end of the night. But I know better now. Thirty-three Octobers in and I know: we don’t dress up as ghosts. We carry them. In our playlists and our memories and the way we still set the table for people who aren’t coming. And I don’t think that’s haunting, I think that it is our sweetest devotion. That’s love that refuses to respect the boundaries between here    and     gone. Tonight I’ll light my favorite candle. Not for Halloween, not for ambiance, but for everyone who should be 33 with me and isn’t. For the thin places in October where they get close enough to touch. For this season that is what I know: that we are all always in conversation with our ghosts, and the only question is whether we’re brave and present and quiet enough to listen.

This morning , my friend texted me a photo of a cemetery in Ohio, not the one where anyone we know is buried, just one she walks past, the way you do in October when every graveyard becomes magnetic. The oldest stone she could find was from 1847. Someone who lived 28 years and that was it, the whole story, carved in marble that’s mostly worn away now. I did the math without meaning to. They never got to hear recorded music. Never heard a voice played back. Died in a world where ghosts were the only way the dead could speak.

And now look at us. I’ve got my parents’ voices saved on voicemails and I guard them like prayers. One day they’ll be gone and I’ll still hear my dad say yo, call me back, you’ve got mail here, do you want me to open it? like he’s just busy, like he’s still out there waiting. October will make me press play more than I should. Makes me wonder if technology hasn’t just made us all amateur necromancers, planning to resurrect people through sound, through video, through the digital traces they left behind. 

There’s a poem I love: I can’t remember who wrote it, which is its own kind of haunting, that says something like the dead are never silent, we just learn their new language. October is when I’m most fluent. When the light changes and the air gets that copper taste and suddenly I’m 16 again, walking home from school past houses already decorated with skeletons and cobwebs, thinking I was immortal because I hadn’t yet learned what it costs to be wrong. At 33, I know too many people who aren’t here. That’s the tax of living, I think. You collect absences like some people collect vinyl. My therapist says I shouldn’t say it like that, like it’s morbid, but I think she doesn’t understand that October people don’t flinch from the dark. We were born into it. We know that death is just the shadow side of having been alive, that you can’t have one without preparing for the other.

Yesterday I bought a pumpkin I have no intention of carving. I just wanted it on my porch, something living that’s also dying, making its peace with becoming decoration, becoming sustenance, becoming soil. Everything in October is in that liminal space. Half here, half gone. The perfect mirror for being 33, which is young enough to still be becoming but old enough to know what you’re leaving behind. I’ve been watching Formula One races on YouTube at night when I can’t sleep. Not the new ones, but the ones from the seventies and eighties, when drivers died regularly and everyone just accepted it as part of the sport. Ronnie Peterson, Gilles Villeneuve, Ayrton Senna. Men who got in machines knowing the machines might kill them and did it anyway because speed was worth it, because the feeling of being that alive was worth the risk of being that dead.

At 33, I understand that impulse differently than I did at 23. It’s not about being reckless. It’s about knowing that everything ends and choosing to be magnificent anyway. It’s about the corner you take at 180 miles per hour not despite the danger but because the danger makes you present, makes you here, makes every breath after feel like prayer. My friend sent me a card with a ghost on it. A Halloween card that she made into a birthday card. Love that. It’s one of those old-fashioned sheet ghosts, all innocence and round eyes. Inside she wrote happy birthday to my fellow October baby, we came in making noise and haven’t stopped since. She’s right. I’ve always been loud. Even when I’m writing quiet things, even when I’m alone in my home at 2 AM listening to a sad song on repeat, I’m making noise. Refusing to be silent. Refusing to be a good ghost. Because that’s what we’re taught, isn’t it? To be good ghosts. To haunt politely. To not make our grief too loud or our absence too obvious. But I was born in the month that says no to all that. The month that says: be loud about who you’ve lost. String up the decorations. Light the candles. Let the dead know you haven’t forgotten them, that you’re still here making noise in their honor.

Tomorrow I’ll wake up at 33 for the second time and it will be October sixth and the leaves will be turning the whole neighborhood into a fire that doesn’t burn. I’ll make coffee. I’ll put on a record. I’ll text back the people who remembered a day late with the same amount of love. And I’ll feel them, all my ghosts. In the room with me, not scary, not sad, just present. Just here in the way October knows how to make space for: with honor, with remembrance, with the understanding that we only get so many trips around the sun and every single one is on borrowed time.

So yes, I’m haunted. Yes, I carry my dead with me everywhere. But in October especially, I don’t carry them as much weight. I carry them like light. Like the jack-o’-lanterns that will line my street in a few weeks, glowing from the inside out, making beauty from the carved-out spaces, from the emptiness, from everything we’ve hollowed out to make room for

the flame.

chase owens