Walpurgisnacht

Canned. It's not Walpurgisnacht and I am in my junior year.


I'm a college freshman and it's Walpurgisnacht.

Okay, I seem to have gained enough credits to have suddenly become a sophomore mid-year. And this is technically a university.

But it is Walpurgisnacht.

Every Walpurgisnacht, Halloween, New Year's and occasionally 4th of July, as well as evenings when the light is purplish and sinister and the wind is blowing, I feel like something's missing.

I feel a sense of longing I can't articulate too well. Can one be nostalgic for something that never existed?

I just wish that there were some kind of magic out there - that there were, say, actual ghosts manifesting themselves and demanding vengeance, or that I could turn into a slavering hellwolf and go scare villagers. Or that some magic system worked - whether it be intricate Hermetic scribing, hippie-dippy chaos magick, or pure and simple voodoo.

I'm not an overly mystical person, though I would be if it all didn't seem so goofy. All the Wicca literature my friend Charles keeps lending me strikes me as just let's-pretend; there's so much "visualize yourself surrounded in a cone of white, healing energy" stuff that it looks more like 100 Tricks To Play On Your Own Mind.

I'm living on the fifth floor this year. I look out over the campus at dusk and want to go out and do something. Not just bike to the movie theater, or ingest toxic substances, or hang out at overly loud clubs.

I wish some ancient vampire would deign to teach me the secrets of immortality, at the expense of my humanity or just my neighbors' wellbeing. I wish that whilst researching Alnico magnets I'd stumble on some dusty tome in the library and gain terrible dark powers, or that I'd run into the earthly manifestation of some hideous elder thing and become a human pawn for the forces of Evil. Or even the forces of Cosmic Indifference.

I don't think I'm living in a fantasy world - I have a fair grip on reality, mundane though it may be. I just wish that this world were more...I guess that for once the right word would be "eldritch." I wish something otherworldly, magical, puissant and slightly spooky would happen.

Do many other people feel this way? Does this mean I have to become a poet or something? Should I just read pulp fantasy novels, buy a unicorn-themed suncatcher, suck it up and move on?

It's Walpurgisnacht, and once again, the dead are NOT holding sway. Dammit.