Day 187: Halloween

Hey you. Have you recently walked into the break room at work to find Gale and John and Lizzie chatting about decorations, and you've said, Oh, what are the decorations for? and they've paused and looked at Gale, who has coughed and said he's throwing a small Halloween party tonight, just more of a get-together really, a quiet affair, and then he's paused again and no one has said anything and Lizzie has started looking through the snack cupboard intently and John has busied himself at the coffee machine, and then finally Gale has asked if you would like to come to the party, and you've said that, yes, that sounds lovely, and Gale has said Great, well, great, OK, yes, OK then, and the three of them have walked out of the break room and now here you are with a Halloween party to attend and no ideas for a costume?

Well, if so then fear not, because I've got you covered with this handy list of practical and cost-effective costumes to ensure your night goes spooooookily well!

- That celebrity you sort of look like. Remember that time you wore your hair down and Todd from accounting called you Emma Stone in the morning meeting, and then when everyone was changing their Facebook profiles to their celebrity lookalikes you set yours to a photo of Emma Stone, and after a second glass of wine you added a comment to the photo in which you tagged Todd and said you didn't see the likeness yourself but maybe he was on to something, and you thought for a long time, on your sofa, alone, with now your third glass of Australian merlot, and finally you added a winking face emoji to the comment, and pressed send, and then you waited on your sofa not really watching Holby City on catch-up until past midnight when your phone buzzed with a notification telling you Todd had liked your comment, and you wore your hair down the next morning, and every day of morning meetings for three months, but Todd never said anything again, and later you found out he'd been sleeping with Lucy from HR since the office pub quiz last Christmas to which you'd not been invited because it would have "made the teams uneven"? Well, maybe it's time to bring back that classic.

- Something slutty. Why not crack out that risque dress from the back of the wardrobe you bought online two years ago and haven't yet had the courage to wear? Oh, but now you try it on you remember that it does make your breasts look less like the plump grapefruit of the model in the picture and more like two pale, shaved guinea pigs that have been gassed to death in their burrows. And the plunge neckline draws attention to that birthmark on your shoulder you hate. And your only tights without obvious ladders are the wrong colour, so there'll be no hiding the lumpy twists of your varicose veins. Maybe a slutty mummy then, which, contrary to the obvious interpretation, is just you in the dress and then wrapped head to toe in thick bandages. Perfect.

- Something political. That's what your co-workers appreciate about you, right, the fact you're au fait with current affairs? How about going as the woman "too ugly" for Jair Bolsonaro to rape? Someone "grabbed by the pussy" by the current Republican president, who bragged about it to the old Republican president's first cousin? Or an immigrant mother fleeing torture and rape in her country just to have her baby torn from her at the US border and interned in a barbed wire camp without adequate resources while being used as a symbol of hate to distract the masses while the ruling elite take all the money and give it to the already richest and most despicable of society? Or, no, maybe a Bangladeshi garment worker, sleeping on a concrete floor with fifteen other girls in a makeshift factory in an export-processing zone thousands of miles from her home village and family, earning a dollar and change for 80-hour gruelling weeks in horrendous conditions, where birth control pills are handed out like candy by managers who think pregnant women make for unproductive workers, and where those who do give birth have been known to do it under desks while at their machines, sometimes flushing babies down the toilet for fear of reprisal from bosses - and all this so the people at the party you are attending, these very people, can buy cheap costumes from Primark and Topshop and wear them once and then throw them away, which of course is also a contributing factor to the fashion industry being one of the worst offenders for pollution on the planet. Err. Why are you doing this again?

- Lucy from HR. She of the office pub quiz. She of the insouciantly tousled bangs. The thighs just the right amount of plump in her designer-label pencil skirts. The spine that arches seductively as she bends over Todd's desk and musses his papers playfully, picks up his pens and chews on them, pulls slowly but firmly on his tie with those long, elegant fingers, pulling until the tie goes taut, just a touch further, before letting it fall back and straightening herself and walking away on six-inch heels that surely she must have taken lessons somewhere to be able to glide so demurely across the room upon. Why not go as Lucy from HR? Slap on makeup, dye your hair, squeeze your calloused feet into heels, drink all of a bottle of Aldi-brand peach schnapps, and turn up to the party screaming to Todd that you've made yourself into the woman you know he wants. A foolproof plan.

- Yourself. Or go as yourself. You're 35. You've been single for four years now. You're not even sure if you're mentally secure enough to raise children, whether you want to bring them into this bitter world sliding inexorable into far-right fascism, but you're rapidly running out of time for that even to be an option. You've been overlooked for promotion on a continuous basis since you started at the firm that you were only ever working in as a stop-gap but in which you've now laboured for so long that it's listed as your employer on your Bebo profile, if Bebo profiles are even still a thing. The wallpaper has been peeling behind your dresser since at least last spring, and you have neither the energy nor the inclination to fix it. It just peels gradually higher and higher, and you feel a similar peeling inside yourself, down in your soul, it is as if your being is tearing slowly asunder, and soon you will tear right through and fall to the floor as two wispy sheets on the ground, not even making a mess because there is nothing, you feel, of any substance, nothing real or pulsing or beating, inside you. It is all dust. And your cat doesn't love you. He only stays because you feed him. You haven't painted in years. You look at your old sketchbooks now and it all looks so mundane, so uninspired, and you wonder if anything fuelled your old belief in your secret talent beyond that central illusion that you were special, that you mattered. But you are not special. You do not matter. You will die, alone, and then you will be gone, and no one will remember that you once lived, just as the universe itself will fade, the very energy that fires it pushing it slowly away from itself, into the reaches of oblivion, until every grain of matter comes to rest isolated and unseen and abandoned, staying there, in stasis, for eternity; empty, meaningless, dead.

On second thoughts, maybe you won't go to that party after all. Happy Halloween though!