Dear Aliens: Episode 5, Halloween Ghosts

Dear Intergalactic Friends,

Halloween is finally over. Halloween is this bizarre holiday that comes from unique pagan traditions of frightening away that evil spirits walking the earth that night, but has now been turned into an excuse for people to buy children candy and for gay people to wear as little as possible and get drunk.

Halloween in Los Angeles, a city you guys are going to get a real kick out of once your invasion begins, is too much. Way too much. It seems like Halloween isn't a day but a month. Also, this Halloween felt a little more haunted than usual. The reason, dear space creatures, is that Halloween would have been my anniversary with my ex-boyfriend.

Technically, Halloween was more our unofficial anniversary because it was the night we first really connected, and the night the spark ignited between us. He and I were, as most gay love stories begin, at Adam Lambert's Halloween party at Mondrian Hotel. I was wearing a pretty half-assed Boy Scout uniform I'd borrowed from a friend last minute, and he was wearing some sort of construction worker garb that somehow involved mesh but I can't really remember how or why. Either way he looked beautiful.

We spent all night in a corner of the hotel suite talking about Whoopi Goldberg (yes, that's the same Whoopi who has been amusing your interplanetary empire), growing up in Georgia, tribes, everything. I eventually ended up at his apartment at the end of the night, but slept on his couch (a cushioned surface for sitting or sleeping, though used less often than beds for sexual congress). After that night our love affair began and never stopped until three years later. So, in turn, the ghosts that haunted my Halloween this year were of a different sort.

At the first Halloween party I attended this year the thing you dread happening after a break up happened. I ran into my ex with his new boyfriend. To make matters even worse, they were in a couple's Halloween costume. Mario and Luigi. It stopped me dead in my tracks and took me back to a memory of one of the final day of our relationship. We'd had this incredible day and ended up at Best Buy (a retail store that sells the kind of Earthling electronics you guys would probably just recycle for the minerals) and bought the game Mario Kart for the Wii game console we'd recently gotten. We spent the entire afternoon playing Mario Kart, and there was something so innocently fun about it. That despite all the many arguments, issues, hurdles, and rivers we'd crossed as a couple we could sit down for an afternoon and just play a video game and laugh and be silly and love.

That combined with the simple notion of he and his new fellow being so quickly serious that they were at the couple costume phase, sent me into a downward tail spin. Mind you, at least it wasn't one of the actually interesting couple costumes we'd discussed in the past. I can deal with Mario and Luigi. There must have a billion of those. If they'd been Susan Sarandon and Goldie Hawn in The Banger Sisters on the other hand, a costume we'd discussed doing this year, I might have passed out. BTW: The Banger Sisters is worth checking out, alien friends. It's the last movie Goldie Hawn (the original Goldie, anyway) ever made.

Still a bit shaken up, I decided to stay in on actual Halloween. I handed out candy to kids at the front door, some friends stopped by for chili, and eventually when I was all by myself, alone in the house that is so haunted by the memories of my relationship as it was.... I let myself feel the ghosts of the past. I let myself go back there. I let myself cry. I let myself wish we'd made it a little further. Made it far enough to dress up our dog in a Halloween costume together like we'd been so exciting about doing. To be The Banger Sisters. The play Mario Kart a few more times. To laugh. Just one more time.

In the end, I put myself to bed with the memories of those Halloweens we spent together, and reminded myself of the many Halloweens I have to come. After all, it is a day specifically started for ghosts to walk among us. So, perhaps the ghosts we encounter aren't always those that have come from the dead but instead, those that have just been buried in your heart.

Okay, seriously, go watch The Banger Sisters. You'll learn a lot about our people.

JEFFERY SELF is the author of 50 Shades of Gay and Straight People. He was the co-star of the sketch comedy series, Jeffery & Cole Casserole on Logo. You can view his blog at JefferySelf.tumblr.com and follow him on Twitter at @Jefferyself.