Sunday scaries take on a whole new meaning for a Halloween hangover. And not the candy-induced kind…
Over the course of the last 48 hours, I dressed as a Buckingham Palace guard, drank my body weight in Surfsides and Hugo spritzes, ate a mozzarella stick off a table that wasn’t mine, and drunkenly nuzzled my head against a large woman I didn’t know as I fell asleep on my train home. Honestly, I’m shocked I didn’t ride it to the end of the line.
Moral of the story: It was a Halloweekend well-spent.
Living my life has always inspired my writing in some shape or form. Although I write fiction, my creativity is punctuated by my lived experience as a twentysomething human. By drunk cigarettes and stunning hikes and coffee chats…and hangovers.
I’ve been thinking about hangovers a lot lately. And not because I currently smell like a brewery and have vodka coursing through my veins. I’ve been thinking about life hangovers. The kind that leave us with a heavy emptiness after an extraordinary experience comes to an end. Sure, it may not be marked by the pain of tiny jackhammers chiseling into my skull after a long night of Jägerbombs, but the extreme pain caused by that hole in my heart after grieving an experience is a symptom I’ve become very familiar with.
I felt that pain after my last shift as a server on the Jersey Shore, and after I moved out of my college apartment. And unlike a drinking hangover, this heartache lingers long past the infamous morning after. Over time, the pain gets smaller, a dull ache, to the point where some days I don’t notice it at all. But on days I do, it’s a reminder of something I would never want to forget. A bittersweetness that seeps into my past and present in irrevocable ways.
Life ebbs and flows, and I love writing about the beauty in the curves. Lately, life has been pretty incredible. I like my job, I’ve befriended colleagues, and my book baby found the home I’d only ever pictured in my dreams. I can honestly say that the joy of this era of my life has made the years of querying and rejection and sleepless nights completely worth it. And yet, I’m afraid. Afraid of what happens next. Afraid of the second shoe dropping. Afraid of what happens once this is all over. Happiness and fear are two sides of a dangerous coin. I’ve never been happier, so I feel like I’ve never had more to lose. Isn’t that how it works? The higher the high, the lower the low?
I think in a lot of ways, being afraid makes us human. Afraid of what we can’t control. But life is too short to focus on what happens when something ends. Sure, it’s an inevitability, but it’s also unpredictable, and there’s a silver lining that we don’t always see. There's something innately human about how the joy something brings us defines the pain that follows, and the bittersweetness that comes after that. The small morsel of sweetness that will reside in our hearts long after an experience is over, like a talisman that reminds us of the love we have for something or somewhere or someone.
Apologies for the ramble...I just love psychoanalyzing the existential dread that hangs like handsewn curtains in the background of my life. Anyway, I guess this is my long-winded way of saying I’m hungover and feel too unwell to do anything but overthink and type.
Summer Rayne is coming to Olive Press Publishing in spring 2027. If you find the way I talk endlessly of such existential crises at all charming or endearing, I hope you’ll give Rayne and her story a chance because there’s plenty more where that came from.
-Julia ♥
