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I can't remember the last time I was sick. This isn't just normal sick, this is sleeping 12 hours every night and waking up with every sinus cavity in my head clogged with hard, dry snot sick. This is temples visibly throbbing with pain sick. I forgot what to do in the event of this kind of sickness. I used to get sick like this every month, but I think it's been almost a year since the last time.

It all started on Halloween night. I usually don't do anything for Halloween; I blame my parents for this. My mom is protestant to the point of paranoia. She's one of those people who is convinced that halloween is the work of the devil. My siblings and I were never allowed to dress up when we were young. When our friends asked us why we didn't, we had to tell them that halloween was the devil's holiday. If my mother found out that we wanted to celebrate halloween, or if we were telling people that we didn't agree with this devil's holiday defenition, then she would determine that the satan had corrupted us, and we needed to be punished. I swear I'm not making this up. It took me many years for me to realize that normal people do not reason like this, but by that time, my childhood had already disapeared into the past, and I was left without any halloween memories.

The memories seem to be what makes it special. Whenever I go to a halloween party, I always end up in the middle of a conversation about what people did for halloween when they were younger. It's depressing, listening to those stories and feeling like you never had a childhood.

So, this year, I was going to do nothing, but then some people asked me to come trick-or-treating in Ladd's Addition for cans to donate to the Oregon Food Bank. There was a group of about 16 girls going, and they were aching for a male to join them, so I quickly turned my clothes inside out, and went as "inside out boy." The reverse layers didn't retain very much heat, and I became very cold. As we collected cans, people insisted that we also took candy, which i ate a lot of. After we were done, I went home. I had homework, and all of my "friends" seemed very eager to exclude me from their plans.

So, depressed about my lack of childhood, the freakish conditions under which I was raised, the fact that I am falling behind in school, and the fact that everybody was once again treating me like a disease, I sat outside my building and smoked cigarette after bummed cigarette until my throat was coated with a hefty layer of carcinogens.

It must have been the cold, the chocolate, the smoking, and the stress that did it to me, because the next day I woke up feeling like my head was a dried-up snot factory. It's been this way ever since.