Page 4 of The Wonder of You
Chapter 4
I can’t help but grin. The child inside me comes forward as my eyes meet the circus.
Our usual park, the place I used to play when I was younger, has been turned to a colourful delight. There are circus tents, food stands, glowing lights and the sound of laughter filling the night air.
A child runs past me holding pink candy floss. A clown lumbers over to me on oversized feet.
“Are you ready?” the clown squeezes his big red nose, gives me a smile and then walks off.
He looks back at me for a moment, losing his clownish grin and simply just staring.
I wave awkwardly.
I feel so young and free. A nervous, but excited energy runs through me as I pay the entry fee and walk into the circus grounds. I look down at my colourful ticket forThe Golden Valley Circus.
The three circus tents are exactly as I imagined them to be. White and red stripes, but the lights around them are multi-coloured and they twinkle like a Christmas tree even in the middle of summer. The joy of the other people around is almost infectious, an infection I want to catch.
Goodness, is this what it means to live? All these people with their own internal thoughts, their own traumas, their own lives… it’s not just me suffering on this big spinning ball floating in space. I take a breath to steady myself. It’s like I was living in black and white, and now I only see colour.
I wish my grandad was here, but he’d be so proud of me for coming out of the house and seeing all this.
You enjoy yourself, my girl, you never know who you’ll meet at the wonder of the circus,he’d say.
I can almost feel my heart beating out of my chest. I look at the food stands; candy floss stalls, lollypop stalls, pick-a-mix sweets. There’s a coffee stand too, but my desire for coffee isn’t too intense for once. I don’t need coffee to wake me up or put me in the moment. The atmosphere of the circus has already done that.
A man on a unicycle rides past me, making the children laugh as he pretends like he’s going to fall off. The clown from before is handing out balloons. A fortune teller is waving people towards her. A smiling lady with bright pink hair paints animal faces on children and some of the adults too. A pair of young twins who are obviously a part of the event going by their fancy colourful dresses stop when they see me. They whisper to each other, giggle and then bow to me.
I put my hand over my mouth as I laugh out loud. The noise is foreign to my ears and it’s unusual for me that it’s not fake, but I can’t help it. The laughter keeps coming.
“Renée, are you really laughing?” Lydia looks at me like she’s going to cry and I don’t mind her question, I don’t mind her pointing it out. It feels good.
“This is really something,” I respond, but I don’t meet her eye. I see a group of men wearing black trousers and red tops run into the back of one of thetents. They’re wearing large black hats and I smile, feeling as if I’m part of a movie set.
This doesn’t feel real.
A group of women follow them, dressed in tight leotards that must be designed for acrobatics. It almost takes my breath away as I imagine them swinging around up high, taking their lives into their hands to perform something spectacular for us.
A child clown scoots past me. She has a painted white face with bright red lips and cheeks. Her wig is a mixture of red, pink and blue. Her outfit isn’t stereotypical clown, instead it’s yellow from neck to ankles with a blue waistcoat and a purple belt. She wears red shoes that fit her, unlike the big shoes that the clowns so typically wear. I notice she runs to the clown I saw earlier; he wears a similar outfit but has the big red nose on. He wraps his arm around her and pulls her close. I wonder if they are a father and daughter duo. I don’t feel the usual pit of despair and envy though; I just feel a sense of love that I want to see more of.
These people look at home.
They are withtheir peopleintheir place.This is where they belong.
I wish I knew what that felt like. I long for the kind of warmth these people so obviously share. It’s been a long time since I felt that.
Now my grandparents are gone, I only have my dad and sister, and sometimes it feels like they’re tolerating me. As if it’s their duty to keep an eye on me because we’re related, despite their desire to look the other direction. Yeah, so Lydia invited me out, but I know it’ssimply out of sympathy. There is no point denying the truth. Sometimes I don’t know if Dad is just checking on me because he thinks I’ll commit suicide. He shows his affection sometimes, but I don’t think he knows how to look at me.Reallylook at me, you know?
I wonder if he blames himself for what happened with my Uncle Carl. If he feels he failed at his job as a protective father. I feel as though he can’t look at me without those memories flashing through his mind and taunting him. It reminds me how Carl ruined my life in a way that will never truly go away. He took my innocence while I was still in primary school. He took the ability of some people remembering I am a human and not just a picture of childhood trauma and the mark it leaves. I know people act like it because they don’t know what to say, because it scares them that I’ll talk about what happened and they’ll feel uncomfortable. In those moments, I don’t have a mature thought process.
Instead, it makes me feel like they won’t look at me because I am dirty.
I ammorethan my past. I just wish other people knew that.
Perhaps I never knew how lonely I was until this moment. How much I really do wish I had some company, some friends of my own. People like me, people who are not always understood by others or even by themselves. I know others have suffered the way I have, and I know that like me, they just need a hug from someone who cares. I’m not a fan of being touched, but a hug from the right person might just bring me back tolife in a way that this circus seems to be doing. In a way that will colour my usual grey world.
This circus seems to be doing something to me. Helping me see through the fog that has shrouded my eyes for so long. Could this magical place be clearing my mind? Or could it just be me leaving the house and seeing something real for the first time in forever? I ask for people to see me as a human but maybe I need to remind myself too.
Damn, I wish I had a voice that would be listened to, or maybe just a friend to share this with.
