"Everyday is Halloween"

Its an extremely dark and rainy Halloween night in Texas, and I am painting my fingernails black. I cant help but smile when I see the blue lighting crash out side my office window and feel my entire apartment shake as the thunder booms. I am getting ready for a party tonight but amidst the the black eye liner, black lipstick, and black nail polish I recently purchased for this evening the memories creep into my brain with velvet fingers. I had almost forgotten, I guess most of us do after enough time passes. Time goes by and who you are becomes who you have always been. No, as a young man I didn't do sports, the chess club, honor role, or school politics. If you were to put a label on it I guess you would call me Gothic, but the lifestyle seemed so much deeper back then. We were all so tragically beautiful, teenage angst physically manifested in black on black and sex. Most people don't think about how beautiful pain can be. Do you remember the poem you wrote when that girl or guy broke your heart? You will never write like that again. Even if you never showed it to anyone it was pure and beautiful and yours. Its was in every song you listened to and wondered how that band could capture your exact pain in those lyrics. You played it over and over as you cried alone in you room. For most of the kids I grew up with the pain was not fleeting but constant, and usually inflicted at home. With a touch or a smile between black painted lips you never had to say "I'm gay and my parents hate me", "my mother drinks and beats me", "my father molests me", or "I was rapped". It was one androgynous people and we inherited a lifestyle where all the darkness and pain was made into something beautiful. For some it was the rebirth in death that allowed them to get through those confusing and turbulent high school years, after all how could anyone hurt you if you were already dead. I look at the Gothic kids now as they file into Hot Topic and I can only hope that for them it is merely a fashion statement, but I know for some it isn't. I guess all of us romanticize our youth in one form or another. My thoughts go back to the nights when we would go to the club and dance until the sweat soaked the patent leather and velvet we wore. The grave yards at midnight when we would talk into the morning hours as we drank and smoked our clove cigarettes, our make up smudged the smell of drying sweat and tea rose in the air. I couldn't fathom how anyone would or could leave a lifestyle so accepting and understanding for the cold and lonely world of the "norm". I don't think any of us ever thought we would sell out or grow up...but we did. The ones who escaped without suicide, an addiction, a disease, or complete insanity became uncommonly well rounded people. Some of us learned that it was okay, that our pain didn't dictate who we were or who we could be, and we learned to see the beauty in the light as well as the dark. To be sure it was a razor blade we danced on, as I neared 18 so many had been lost to suicide and drugs that it scared the shit out of me.Now my ass length long black hair has been replaced with an irreverent spiked "corporate punk" cut. My skin has gone from a nearly translucent white to a light copper tan. And my once leather, rubber, silk, and velvet clad body now sports the labels of Banana, Armani, Versace, and Kenneth Cole. Yeah, I guess you could say I sold out. Do I regret it? No. I like my life and who I am, I am happier now than I have ever been. However I think that I will always think back fondly of a time when everyday was Halloween.