The Woods & Adult Halloween
There was a tree in my backyard growing up covered in furry, colorful gypsy moth caterpillars. They look like moving, small antique rug samples and apparently, wreak havoc and kill everything they feed on like most things that look pretty. I loved picking them up and taking them into my bedroom or secretly cupping them in my hands on car rides. I never kept them as pets, always returned them to the tree. The tree was probably like “Fuckin’ hell.” This was around the time, I’d catch daddy long legs spiders and put them into bigger, garden spiders webs to see what happened next. I caught frogs in plastic pales and deer were unafraid of me because of my size, so a big pack would often stomp their front feet at me in a threatening West Side Story way. Deer have never gotten as close to me as they did when I was five and neither has nature.
We lived in thick woods with zero neighbors within reach. I reveled being alone in the woods and felt complete ease, and slight homesickness for wherever I came from. This time in life gets overlooked and understudied. I was setting up seances before I knew what I was doing and had distinct feelings of being followed or simply not alone. In a lot of ways, I am always trying to get back to that connected place of feeling held by the sky and dirt. Like most people I know, around six years old, for those tapped into it, was a pretty trippy time of unexplainable paranormal or spiritual encounters.
Some friends remember levitating as a kid in bed, others knew when certain family members transitioned out of this life without being told. Another friend could switch perspectives completely, and become whatever object or person he laid his attention on. Eventually this power became too disorienting and he gave it up as a teen. I don’t remember anything that specific besides the feeling that me being born in 1990 was a complete rouse, a joke. Writing the date on grade school papers made me laugh and felt like the first lie I would have to tell forever.
I was named after the first major “past life” case in America in the 50s, so in truth, I may just like ghost stuff. “Bridey Murphy” was the name a Southern woman called herself, while under hypnosis when the hypnotist asked “who were you before you were born?” She began speaking in an Irish lilt and started talking about Cork, Ireland in great specificity. Afterwards, there was a big search for Bridey Murphy to see if this woman really did exist. Though they couldn’t find her, a lot of the details, the woman had recalled, were true. There was a shitty movie made about it. Regardless, I felt a deep connection to reincarnation as a kid that felt paradoxical to what I was learning at Catholic school where we would spend our days talking Jesus, cutting frogs open, and politely not mentioning 9/11. I still remember the salty taste of formaldehyde and frog juice that spurted into my mouth as I cut into my bull frog.
During this period, when non-existence was close by, death felt like a fascinating neutral concept until Disney movies and Catholicism conditioned it into high stake tragedy. Still, the instinct to pick at the tapestry of reality remained. Flirting with fatality, I crossed a rushing reservoir alone when I was 10, four inches of water rushed across my velcro sneakers, one slip and my head would have cracked on the concrete edge. My grandmother had paintings all over her house of the biblical scene of the two little kids crossing the rickety bridge with the guardian angel protecting them and I wanted the experience. The moment I crossed safely was a silent, solitary triumph. Yes, god is real, baby, shagadelic, baby! (Austin Powers 1997)
My memories of the caterpillars and the rushing reservoir are vivid and Terrence Malicky in a way that worries me- will I ever touch life in the same way? Or am I romanticizing something that never really was? Are these syrupy memories around the age of five completely obscured through my minds lens reframing every so often depending on what I need right now. Probably. I am rooting around the old brain attic once again, looking for the times where I had faith in something quiet and assuring.
I look for beauty or play in different ways now that I am older and impure. On Halloween, a man profusely sweating out ketamine asked if he could hold his hand on my collar bones, with the steady, earnest voice of a confused priest, I said “yes.” He went on to tell me how much he hates LA and how the “me too movement” was bad in a lot of ways. I nodded compassionately with the stranger’s warm hand near my neck. There was something Christmassy about the whole thing!
On the other side of me, sat my friends precious black cat named “Void” who was there sopping up the dense vibe coyly. I see myself in cats, always sitting where they shouldn’t for just a little too long, long enough to hear at the end of 2021, a man explain why women should be quiet. The man needed me to listen to his anti-metoo diatribe, but oddly was unimpressed and down right grossed out when I started pushing the buttons on my fart machine that was rigged to my pelvis, while explaining my costume: an aerobics teacher who died from a deadly queef. He said he wish I hadn’t told him that. There was zero humor in the ketamine sprayed air, the children were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads.
My telephone line to the collective seems dead. Usually, there are patterns of feelings I can’t shake, often backed up by astrology and the phases of the moon. Right now there seems to be no pulse that I can sense anymore, a liminal place where everyone is doing whatever they think they should be doing. Is every day adult Halloween? Yes. Has life ever really been different than it is right now? No.