Everyday Is Halloween (Ministry) Producer: Al Jourgensen © 1987 Bike Music (on behalf of Lovolar Music). All rights reserved.
Her Endless Day
She Died at Midnight, But the House Never Let Her Go.
I awaken once more beneath the sighing eaves of a house that remembers me better than I remember myself. Dust drifts through the air in slow spirals, catching the pale moonlight like motes of lost time, and I stretch my spectral limbs through corridors that have grown long in my absence. The walls breathe. They creak and whisper secrets I have forgotten, or perhaps never truly knew, though they insist I listen. Candle flames tremble without wind, and I convince myself they shiver for my passing, though of course I have no weight to stir the air. Time has halted here. Clocks are frozen, their hands pointing always to midnight, the hour in which my mortal life ceased to matter.
Yet I remain, a breathing shadow in a place that neither lives nor dies.
Sometimes, when I press my palm against the cold glass of a window, I see the living walk past, children laughing behind masks of painted terror, their lanterns glowing like stolen stars. They call it Halloween. How innocent, how deliciously naive. They do not know that I inhabit every October, every day, every night, every candle-lit fear. To them it is a holiday. To me it is eternity.
I wander through the house and find myself drawn to a desk that should have long since crumbled. There, a letter lies, edges curled and yellowed with time. My own handwriting arcs across the page, though I cannot remember putting pen to paper.
“I remember the sound of your voice in the rain,” it says, and for a heartbeat I feel a warmth I have not touched in decades.
I press my fingers to the ink, and it smudges beneath my ghostly touch. I do not recall whose voice it remembers, or if it is mine. Yet it whispers to me, tethering me to a life that is gone, a love that has evaporated into the air I now inhabit.
I sometimes hear the shadow of a man on the street in my memory, tall and faceless, and the sudden hush that fell over the world that night. The memory is not one I speak aloud, even to myself it is a whisper. It is enough to know that I was undone in an instant, a heartbeat that stretched into forever, and that I have wandered ever since, caught between moments like a moth in an eternal candle flame, drawn to the light I can never touch.
The house remembers me in ways even I cannot name. Floorboards groan beneath my passing, whispering old confidences. Mirrors reflect not my present form, but the woman I once was, alive, breathing, cloaked in lace and moonlight. I sometimes reach toward them, only to meet a pane of cold, unyielding glass, as if reality itself denies me the flesh I once carried. I press my palm to their surface, and the reflection stares back, a silent accusation of what I have lost, what I have become.
More letters appear in the oddest places, Hidden behind a cracked section of wallpaper, tucked beneath the threshold of a door, or resting atop a shelf where dust gathers like memories turned to ash. All are in my hand, all addressed to someone I cannot name, though their presence permeates the ink with longing.
“My beloved, wherever you remain, remember me in the hush between your heartbeats.”
The words pierce me every time I read them. I know that I have written them, yet I cannot recall the act, as if my own soul, in its infinite wandering, sought to speak to the living world it had left behind.
Moths drift endlessly through the house, drawn to flames that do not consume. They circle the candlelight in erratic flight, delicate wings brushing the air like memory brushing my skin. I follow them sometimes, and in their frantic circling I see my own reflection. A creature forever pursuing warmth it cannot claim, beauty that cannot touch the world, desire that will never be quenched.
The house and I are entwined. I am not merely inside its walls, but I am its pulse. My sigh is its draft, my sorrow its creaking timbers. The rusted key on the mantle is mine, though it unlocks nothing but the memory of doors I cannot open, rooms I cannot enter, and a love that resides only in shadowed corners. Sometimes I hear a faint echo of laughter, not from the children outside, but a sound once so intimate that it wrenched my chest with joy. It is my beloved’s voice, perhaps, or the memory of it. Perhaps a trick of the wind.
And yet I listen, because hope persists even in death.
I have walked these halls for centuries, and the world outside has grown strange. The electric glow of streets and cars, the laughter of children behind masks of every imaginable terror, the paper ghosts they carry, it all reaches me like a dream half-remembered. They pretend to haunt. They pretend to fear. They do not know that for some of us, fear and desire are not costumes we put on. They are the very air we breathe.
The music box turns without a hand. Its song is older than my memory, sweet and melancholy, and I let it drown the silence that is otherwise my only companion. In its notes, I hear fragments of a life I once lived, a walk in the rain, laughter beneath a lantern, a glance that promised forever. And yet forever is precisely what I cannot have.
Sometimes I see him in the corner of my vision, faceless, a shadow slipping across the cobblestones of memory. I do not hate him. I do not curse him. I do not even remember his form fully. I only feel the hush he left behind as he took me, the stillness that stretched into infinity. The world turned away from me in that moment, yet I remain, aware, but alone.
Time is a cruel companion. It passes outside these walls, unnoticed, and I watch generations dance past like motes in sunlight. They come, they leave, they celebrate Halloween with lights and laughter, yet I remain. Their joy is fleeting, but my sorrow is perpetual. They carve pumpkins and wear masks. I press my hand to the glass and see myself reflected in every flicker of flame. I see my longing mirrored in their play, and I envy them, not for life, but for the ability to forget.
The letters persist. One appears atop my desk as if I had written it yesterday, though I have not held pen for decades.
“Do not forget me, even when forgetting is mercy.”
I trace the ink with a finger that cannot touch it. I am forgotten, and yet I endure. The house will crumble, the candles will burn out, the world will move on, but I will remain, neither here nor there, suspended in the delicate horror of memory and longing.
I linger in the corridors, passing from room to room, a breath among dust, a sigh among shadow. I press my face to the damned mirrors, watch moths circle candle flames that do not burn, and hear music that plays without human hands. I am witness and participant, eternal, incomplete.
Everyday is Halloween.
The world celebrates a night that to me never ends. They laugh, they scream, they tremble behind masks and lanterns, and I feel a pang of envy so sharp it cuts through the layers of my being. For I am doomed to know the night in its endless depth, to walk its corridors without rest, to love what I cannot touch, to remember what I cannot hold.
I have long ceased to hope for release. The wind hums through the eaves like a lullaby I cannot sleep to. The stars pass in silence, indifferent to my presence. The moon rises, faithful and pale, and I trace its cold light across the floorboards, across the walls, across the letters I have written for no one who can read them.
There is beauty here, and there is terror. There is remembrance, and there is the ache of love that no longer belongs to the world. I am a moth circling a candle that never dies, a shadow wandering corridors that remember my touch, a whisper in the house that waits for no one.
And so I remain.
The world will continue its masquerade, and I will watch, eternal, unchanging, part of the night itself. My voice is a sigh among dust, My sorrow is the draft beneath the doors. My longing is a flame that consumes nothing.
I am here.
I have always been here.
I will always be a specter of a Halloween eternal.