365 Days (Part 1) | ✓

196. Neighborhood

196. Neighborhood: Write about your favorite place in your neighborhood to visit and hang out at.

It's Halloween night... The cul-de-sac is alive with activity. Free hotdogs and nachos are served. Small glow sticks to hang around your neck are handed out. Popcorn and lemonade are made. There's even a free hayride that takes your on a short trip around the streets and a "haunted house." This is really just a garage (of one of my childhood friends, incidentally) with a bunch of Halloween store figures in it. Some of them move or shriek when their motion sensors detect you getting too close. The real purpose of the haunted house is the large flat screen set up inside, and a ridiculously large amount of dads sitting around with beer and burgers, watching football.

I'm standing in the cold on the sidewalk, waiting for my brother, his girlfriend, and her kid to get back from the hayride. They took the last seats, so I didn't go. That's okay; I can stand here and eat free popcorn. (I go back for thirds, by the way.) My Halloween costume is the same simple one I wear every year, ever since I stopped going trick-or-treating myself: It's back jeggings, a black shirt, a cat tail, and a cat mask covering the upper half of my face. (My other brother, who is lingering by the food tables, is dressed up as Steve from Minecraft, and I kidded that I was his ocelot.) His cardboard Steve head is by me. You can't really see out of it very well, so he ditched it pretty early on.

There's times when I think the feeling of the moments make them moments. That was one of those times, feeling this sense of unity in my neighborhood, as we threw a party to celebrate Halloween and dressing up. They do it every year. One time, the father of my middle school crush (who lived just a few doors down from me -- aren't I lucky?) dressed up as the king from Burger King and handed out McDonald's hamburgers. That traitor.

There were a lot of people in the cul-de-sac that night. And the funny thing was, I didn't know a single one. But yet they lived their lives not so far from mine. We drove pass each other. Without the walls and the fences, we would be very close to each other. They had their dramas, joys, sorrows, and triumphs not so very far from my own. And I had no idea who they were.

But on Halloween, the only holiday that my neighborhood throws a party like this, I felt like I knew them all.

Or maybe it was because I meowed at anyone else dressed up as a cat and they usually meowed back.