Total Fucking Disaster
Ignore Me | Kathryn Mockler
I'm helping my mom move and staying at her house is just one long horrible flashback of my childhood.
My most recent flashback involves the time I went to the grade six Halloween dance as a creepy old man and thought I was invisible.
My friend had old man and woman masks. These costumes were to be our last resort if we couldn't find anything better. Well, the last resort became the reality: she was the old woman and I was the old man. For some reason, I thought wearing this mask made me INVISIBLE.
It did not.
As soon as I got to the dance, I realized I had made a terrible costume choice. The other kids wore cute clown and witches and princess costumes. Someone even dressed as a cloud and then there was me with this old man face in a mask I could hardly breathe in.
No one recognized me or talked to me. The mask was terrifying. The head was giant and smelled like rubber and may very well have been the face of Ronald Reagan. Sometimes I still see this mask in my dreams.
When my friend who was the old woman went to the bathroom, I stood in the middle of the gym with tears streaming down my face behind the mask looking at everyone's costumes thinking they were all great and wishing I had a better one to show off.
While no one could see my tears, they could see me staring. After a few minutes, a group of girls came over to me and demanded to know why I was staring at them.
I couldn't say, I was staring because I thought I was invisible and all your costumes are better than mine, so I said sorry, I was in trance, which I guess satisfied them because they went away.
I'm grateful that they confronted me because I would have thought I was invisible for the whole dance and I only thought I was invisible for the first part of the dance which allowed me to somewhat survive the terrible night instead of it being a total fucking disaster.
What was your worst Halloween costume?
Kathryn Mockler is the author of Anecdotes (Book*hug Press).
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