Halloween from the outside

He looked down. Through his feet at  the old, creaking wood floor. Yes, through his feet. A fact he still tried to grow accustomed to. The being a ghost felt strange to him, like it wasn’t quite real. And maybe it wasn’t, for he wasn’t very real either. He was just a fragment of his former self. Just a piece of his soul. It was a terribly lonely existence, all on his own, with no one to confide in, no one who would look at him. Well, at least this was true for every other day of the year but this one. For it was Halloween. The only day the living were able to see him and not only that, but they would treat him as one of their own, not some dead freak. 

So, he exited his house, his feet not quite touching the ground, but close enough it would be impossible to detect. He breathed in the cold night air, smelling the candles and pumpkins lining the street. Heard little kids screaming in excitement, when receiving an especially big quantity of sweets. And he delighted in the sound. It gave him back, some of the joy of being alive. Or at least it reminded him of it. The wind went through him with a force that startled him for a second, making him waver in his step. Making him rethink his plans of roaming the streets tonight. Was it wrong for him to be here? Among those who still held the present of life? Among these little children, who deserved the world? If his heart were still beating, he would have been near cardiac arrest. For his thoughts were running at an impossible speed. Weighting options as if his life depended on it. An ironic thought. 

“Ähm, hello?” a high-pitched voice said. He turned around to find that it belonged to a little girl not standing three feet from him. “Yeah?” his voice sounded odd to his ears, it had been a long time, since he used it. “You look sad. Do you want candy?” the girl asked, extending a hand holding two lollipops and one mars chocolate bar. “Oh, that’s very nice of you! But please, keep it. You’ll have much more fun with it than me.” He said, while crouching down to look her in the eyes. Eyes that watched him with not an ounce of fear in them. “Really?” she asked again, sounding un-curtain. “Oh, yes.” he reassured her. “Ok!” she smiled, putting the candy back in her bucket, clutching it to her chest, as she turned around and ran back to where a few other kids were seeming to compare their amounts of candy. 

The ghost stood up again, watching the girl. Watching all the people. For hours. He just stood there in front of his house. Taking it all in. This atmosphere, the way the world revolved around those people, while he was here, an outsider but still a part of it all. That moment he resolved to always cherish this memory, of what it felt like to be dead and still so alive. A smile stole itself on his face and when the wind caried the leaves across the street, he turned around, walking back into his house. His body fading with every step. He would be back next Halloween. Standing there on the side of the street, hoping to suck it all in. An invisible observer to the whole thing. 

Or at least, that was what he thought. What he didn’t count on was the young boy looking out of his bedroom window, that night. He had not been allowed to go trick or treat so he had resolved to sit at his window and watch everyone this way. But instead of just an ordinary Halloween he witnessed something beyond his imagination. A man in all white, seemingly floating in the air, standing on the opposite sidewalk, unmoving like a statue. Just starring at people passing him, sometimes smiling, as if he had just remembered something amusing. The boy couldn’t tear his eyes away from him, feeling a strange fascination with this stranger. Who was he? Where did he come from? And most importantly, where would he go after he was finished with whatever he was doing? 

The boy wanted nothing more than to just walk up to him and ask him straight away. But that wasn’t possible and so he satisfied himself with making a game out of imagining answers the stranger might give him, had he the chance to ask him. Maybe he would say, he was from a far away land. Coming to visit every Halloween to honor his dead wife, who died here by a very tragic accident. Or maybe he was a special agent, undercover to discover an inmate, who fled from prison. Or maybe he was a ghost, wanting to meet others like him. The little boy didn’t know how close he came to the truth and he would never know in his lifetime, for he would pass away only a few days after this observation. By a tragic accident, involving an escaped inmate. And the ghost would be standing at his window, weeping silent teers for a boy, he never met. Who he didn’t know had surveyed him. Who he simply felt sorry for. 

But what both of them didn’t know, was that the little boy too turned into a ghost, stepping out of his dead body, looking around himself, not quite understanding what was happening. And the other ghost would run out of his house, across the street in a blink of an eye and hug the boy, trying to explain, what was happening to him. And the boy would recognize him, view him as an old friend, as someone he felt an unexplainable connection to. And they would sit down, inside the older ghost’s house and weep. For what had happened to the boy, for what had happened to the ghost. And for the people they had to leave behind.