No more fear

   Happy Halloween.

   First of all, thanks a million to my teachers for having so much due tomorrow. I'm glad they have stumbled into the secret knowledge that teenagers do not have anything they want to do on Halloween. I really apreciate it.

   But the one dose of Halloween I did get to enjoy was dropping my brother and his friends off at a party tonight in a bustling neighborhood that used to be my stomping ground for Halloween. As I drove through the neighborhood I noticed so many familiar sights that vivid memories dragged me back to days of dressing up as a pirate or superhero. A time of excitement and fits of candy obsessed energy, but something was off. Something vital to my childhood about this wonderful day was missing.

   When I first thought about it, I thought that just more people did not go all out with decorations. I thought did some proverbial "good- O'l days" thinking about when the decorations were just scarier and bigger. But when I really thought about it, I came to the realization that the decorations were just as scary and just as big. So what was missing? Nothing about the neighborhood has changed, so it must be me. It must be that as I got older, I lost the ability to see some plastic skeletons and Styrofoam tombstones as a graveyard that could be my untimely demise. Somewhere along the line, I lost the ability to just be afraid of the simple.

   And that makes me sad.

   It shows that I have lost my ability to fear what should scare me. I have come to a place where I am so much more mortified about a AP Physics test tomorrow than I ever could be from a horror movie that a studio spent millions of dollars in hopes to scare the crap out of me. I have become so jaded that I can no longer get that pure, almost giddy, adrenaline rush that comes with fear, and have replaced it with the mundane and eternal fears of stress and worry. As I reflect on that sad fact, I feel as some part of me is gone; a part of me that I can never get back, no matter how hard I strive toward it. And I guess that is the scariest thing of all.