Alexa Daskalakis

The Night That Borrowed Its Name (October 31)

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​They once said this night was when the veil between worlds grew thin.
Maybe they were right—
but maybe what slipped through wasn’t the dead.

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There was once a night that didn’t exist.
It was meant to fall between two others,
but the calendar refused to hold it.

The moon saw the space and filled it anyway.
Clouds drifted differently.
Dogs barked at nothing, not because they were afraid—
because they recognized it.

People lit candles without remembering why.
They said the air felt thinner,
like the world had forgotten how to close its eyes.

Somewhere, a clock struck thirteen,
and no one thought to count it.

Children dreamed of faces they hadn’t met yet.
Old men woke certain they’d already died.
The living crossed paths with their own almosts—
not ghosts, but the versions of themselves
that never quite made it past a choice.

By dawn, the night was gone.
The calendar looked normal again.
But every year since,
the world tries to put it back—
carving pumpkins,
lighting fires,
wearing faces that aren’t theirs—
as if reenacting the memory of the night
that borrowed its name from nothing,
and stayed.