Certainly, I think after a month of near-daily panic attacks in class, certainly I know what I must do. Certainly one cannot go from this state of distress I am in to hanging up streamers in their apartment and buying bacardi for strangers at the end of the month. Certainly we shouldn’t have even planned it in the first place.
And yet: Hellparty. Apartment 6. Starts at 9. Come in costume. Drinks provided.
Sophia and I planned this back when I was normal. I can’t place when I stopped being normal, but it happened in the in-between; some point middling “Oh my God, let’s make it Inferno themed” and just weeks later, setting earlier alarms to give myself time to throw up from anxiety before walking to campus for morning class.
I don’t tell her for a while, though, that I’m not sure if I can do this. I buy all the decorations before the confession comes: there will be other parties. Your costume is wearable for other parties. Last year you didn’t even like parties. I say, “You’ve never had to skip class because you felt obese.”
Sophia says, “You’re not obese” and sighs like she knew this was coming, like we’ve played it out a thousand times before. I feel myself weaken: “I just meant if you wanted to cancel the party, we could. I wouldn’t be mad.”
“I’m excited for the party. I don’t want to cancel.”
I do. I do. I do. “Good. Yeah. Neither do I, then.”
For the latter part of my childhood, I was raised Christian, but before my family’s days in the church began (and even for a while after), my favorite holiday was Halloween. Each year I would pick out my costume almost a month in advance and every day leading up to the holiday, change into it after school just to sit in my room as something that wasn’t myself for a while. Even after my parents decided not to continue celebrating as we had, I always found some way to disappear during October–my birth month, the end of a year, or at least close to it. Certainly, I figured, I needed some sort of respite, something more bearable than the corporeal form I was created in. My first week back at school, I sat for a brief interview during which a boy I only sort of know asked me how I feel sharing my writing so publicly, cognizant that my classmates have read it. Briefly, uncannily open, I replied, “Every day it’s like I put on Riley Ferver like a costume. I don’t think I handle perception well.” And then, “Please don’t put that in.”
It started with my face, the way I look when I look to the left, then down, then up, feeling like if I watched it, some skin there wasn’t mine but evil extra that I couldn’t take off. It became my cheekbones, down, whether I could feel my collarbone or if there was something growing there too. It became the clothes I once hid in, putting something on and it feeling off, saying “go without me” enough that people stop questioning. By October, perhaps ironically, I’ve stopped going to parties. I’ve stopped going for drinks out or sushi. I’ve put work shifts up on the trade board even though I can’t afford to and skipped class even though I shouldn’t. I weigh myself twice daily like clockwork and depend on diet pills and adderall and curtain bangs and pretending I’m invisible. By the time the long weekend rolls around–the brighter first days of the month–I’m incurably itchy but unbearably anxious. I google What to do when you’re in pieces: someone on Reddit says to try veganism. Try yoga. Try masturbation. I don’t eat meat. I don’t beat meat. Certainly, I think this is senseless. Certainly it is actually diet pills and adderall and no one wants to say it. Certainly I’ve found Elizabeth Gilbert’s ninety-nine Reddit accounts in this comment section. Certainly these are not the answers. So when my friend invites me to yoga a week later, swearing this is the one place our classmates won’t be, certainly I have to say yes, right?
We grab coffee before walking to the studio. My friend says, “I think this will be good for you” and I shrug, as if to imply that I cannot fathom what she could mean. I have everything under control. I can’t get into a downward dog on the first try but give it my damnedest, observing the bone in my lower arm as it stretches from my elbow to my wrist, my legs stretching out under me. I want to put my fingers around them and measure, but do not. We end each flow in a corpse pose, shavasana. The idea is to cultivate a total calm, but I’m not sure it’s possible to think about nothing. The instructor walks over to me and whispers “you don’t have to be so tense. It isn’t about perfection.” I let my head hit the mat.
Later, I call my mother and tell her I went to yoga and secretly may have liked it, and she gifts me three months to the studio for my twenty-first birthday. I thank her and laugh: “Most people have gotten me alcohol.” She says, “Good, then. You have enough of that.”
Still, certainly, I think, yoga is not something I am going to do. Certainly I am not that person–not that frivolous white woman with depthless sadness that can be filled by turning over on herself. No, I am an adventurer. If I don’t like something, I don't stand there in my own stillness. Certainly, I repeat like a mantra as I unroll my borrowed mat and begin stretching–certainly I am not someone who finds measurable solace in known bodily discomfort.
I tighten my hand around my wrist until my thumb and forefinger touch, and laugh.
This year for Halloween, my costume is a biblically accurate angel; the thing I've taken to drawing in the margins of my notebooks, my one source of religious comfort. I think my solace in the whole idea comes from the fact that the helpers at the right hand of the Lord look a little scary. They’re covered in eyes, different animal heads, their bodies are often vastly different from how we’d picture a body at all. If I am made in the image of God, the angels are an image of only themselves, and no one can know what exactly that looks like. No one can say whether the angels look right or not. Either way, for the first time in my life I’m faced with the knowledge that it’s going to be me in that costume. I’m going to look like myself. It isn’t exciting. It isn’t a hiding place. It’s a reason for people to look at me more closely. I admire the six wings hanging on my closet door daily, the halo, the eye tattoos, but I hold off from buying the dress until the last possible second, then I order two sizes: a double zero and an eight. They were out of my size, but I could have tried harder–neither will fit and I know it. I could have not gone with extremes.
Sophia is going to be the devil. You know, so we match the party.
Every night, Sophia cooks dinner for herself. I sit on the floor between the trash can and the doorway and watch as she mixes vegetables and sauce into a pan, letting the smells waft up and fill every room. Sophia, to me, is nearly perfect, angelic in a socially palpable way. She drops weight like it is her destiny, barely trying. She cooks for herself like Gordon Ramsey gave his approval a lifetime ago. She leaves with a full plate and says to me on her way out, disapprovingly, “You should make yourself something.” For both of our sakes, I pretend my only trepidation is that I hate cooking. I do hate cooking. That isn’t why I don’t cook. Sophia yells from her room, “Wait, Riley, are you still sitting there?”
“Yeah, why?”
“You wanna know something cool?”
“What?”
“This time next week we’ll be decorating.”
I walk to my room and weigh myself, then attempt to weigh only my breasts and subtract the second number from the first. Certainly, I think, there will be some great change. There is not one.
The entire week leading up to the party, I wake in the middle of night and vomit, each time the realization hits me anew: people will see me at school, in Annapolis, and now in my own apartment, at my own party. I cannot stop them from doing so. Sometimes after I’m sick, I can’t breathe. I lay against the cold bathroom floor and attempt to steady myself, tracing my profile and neck, chest, rib cage against the warped hardwood. I wash myself off, shaking, in the sink. Avoid eye contact with the mirror. Gargle. Spit. Be quiet.
The night before the party, I go to yoga unplanned. I’m restless. Certainly, I think, this will keep my mind off of everything. Certainly it is good to leave the house. It’s a new class–one I haven’t tried, at least–a new instructor. A real blonde. I hate that I notice. She introduces herself, says she hasn’t seen me before. We joke about stress, because it’s Friday night yoga, why else would I be there? I joke that sometimes it’s this or it’s drugs. I justify my own justification. She stops laughing; I picture her sniffing out the lie as it lays to rest on my skin. It’s this. It’s drugs. It’s the permeable membrane of holding each pose for slightly too long, feeling the encased lightning race down each muscle. It’s the measuring tape to my thighs, the classes at school that I choke instead of talk in. It’s adrenaline. It’s diet pills and adderall and two dresses that don’t fit, thinking maybe I’ll look thinner in the larger. It hits me why I have come to love yoga: I can lay myself bare and focus on what I see, while everyone in the room is turned towards their own legs. So yeah, it’s this. It’s drugs. I let myself wander comfortably into downward dog, sink into shavasana.
The final flow ends with aromatherapy, the instructor’s personal touch to each class. Palms up if you want a blessing. I stretch my fingers towards the sky and she comes over, hands on my shoulders and mutters in arabic. After, louder, she says “Your energy is heavy tonight.” I know. I know it is and I know why it is but I don’t know how to stop it. She dips her fingers into the vial and it tips, an accident over my head. She giggles nervously. Alarm bells blare in my brain as oil seeps into my pores, my hair, dripping like tears in and out of my now-open eyes: certainly I will remember this moment for the rest of my life.
Sophia is waiting for me when I arrive home so we can go get the last supplies and begin setting up. Her excitement reverberates through the apartment. I shower quickly, washing off the aromatherapy, letting it turn into exposure therapy until I am no longer followed by the scent of neroli. I allow myself to lay on my bed for just a moment afterwards, beaten like a beached whale in a net, then weigh myself nude: slightly lighter, but only slightly. When I exit my room, Sophia is wearing her devil horns, grinning from ear to ear. The three sets of wings on my closet door aren’t enough to fly out of here.
On the way home from the store, I buy edibles and cigarettes and zyns and open the car window, let the chill of another October’s end hit me as my face grows red from the combination. We bring in the groceries, the alcohol, drink ciders and set up the house. I hang blood red streamers from the front door and a sign reading Welcome to Hell. Before going to bed, tied to her opening shift, Sophia says “This is amazing. Maybe the best it’s ever looked.” It is a hellparty. Certainly, I think, if I were to die here it wouldn’t look out of place. Instead I wander the apartment like a spirit. If I turn around quick enough, a hint of leftover neroli hits me–yoga feels like a week ago already. I gag but don’t throw up the liquor.
Eventually, I figure, it’s coming anyway. I will stay up or I will wake up, but eventually it will be here and I will pace these same trails nauseous again. The Welcome to Hell sign beats against the door. On the edge of my bed I whisper to myself “down, dog” like it is the joke of the hour, tell myself tomorrow will be fine, and it will. I’ll be an off putting angel, a costume inside a costume. People will call it clever and only know half of it. Classmates I hardly speak to will walk up to me at school the whole week after telling me the hellparty was the most fun they had in months.
Hi! Wow! I love imagining people making it to the bottom of my posts but the more logical side of my mind loves to laugh at me for it. If you read that whole thing, thank you so much.
I have been tinkering with this essay for a little over two months now…almost immediately after Halloween I just started writing everything I felt about how the entirety of October went for me. I must have a combined 50 pages from all the drafts I started and put down. Honestly, I still have mixed feelings about this essay. On one hand, I’m proud of it from a technical standpoint. On the other, I struggle a lot writing such personal things. I always ask myself (and this is, I think, a good question to ask yourself when writing generally) why anyone should care. And I never know the answer. I held off from sharing this for a while mostly because of that. But I also admittedly like the ritualistic nature of letting a piece go out into the world once it’s finished so I can start writing a new one. So here—take it. Care or don’t.
If you do, though, I’d be quite honored to hear about it.
More monthly posts coming through the rest of 2025. All my love and blessings xx
Ri