Author: Olavia Kite

I don’t like Cirque du Soleil. It makes me think of disturbing things.

I don’t see it as a normal art company comprising normal human beings. No. Cirque du Soleil is an unearthly realm where everyone is talented (they jump! they bend! they fly!). The inhabitants of the Cirque do no accept people who don’t clap, who don’t laugh at their classic, insipid humor. Thus, they kill them in the most pintoresque ways. It’s so colorful, blood becomes yet another hue on their grotesquely flawless faces. I cannot describe the procedures.

I’m scared. I did not smile when the clowns gazed intently at an abandoned rope. The men who fly and the girl who bends have come back, they stand around my helpless body. I see their doll-like faces staring at me. The singer with the crystal antennae is howling nonsense with her ragged, yet clean voice. It hurts. They hurt.

Silence. Their china faces melt into play-doh smiles. The audience breaks into a hysterical applause. The act is done. The deed is done. The outcast is dead.

I was born twenty years ago. I wonder how things were then. A child is not only a couple’s love product, a child is a person who grows and thinks and feels. I am a child. A person. Growing, thinking, feeling. I can’t believe it… I won’t believe it when I have my own children.

I must admit my first twenty years have been amazing. I am not an unhappy person. Not at all. Sometimes bored, sometimes misunderstood, totally inept in social terms, but never unhappy. I have met amazing people, and through them, I have been able to know much more about myself. So… this time hasn’t been a big waste. Not at all.

I wish I had the right words, instead of all the stuff I’ve written… but… I’m just grateful for all the steps I’ve walked to be right here, where I am now. I’m twenty, and I stand in a segment of the road with a smile on my face.

“The widest land

Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine

With pulses that beat double.”

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

She left her grayish green city once; she left for a town on the riverfront. When she returned she had so much luggage that she had to leave her heart behind. In order to make sure it wouldn’t get lost or accidentally dumped into the river, she entrusted it to a boy who had saved her life once, when she was about to choke in her own monotonous breath. Despite the girl’s constant clumsiness, the boy insisted in saving her over and over and over again. Too bad the boy had to take off too, to his own town of rice paddies and hot springs.

Home again, her suitcase turned into drawers, the girl placed her hand against her chest. She felt nothing. Her face turned pale for a brief moment, but rather than despairing, she immediately dashed to her front door, to wait. Her heart’s custody couldn’t have just run away and let her die… or could it? Who’d want a heart in these days?

Months passed, and her face had lost all possible color and her limbs began to shake. However, something was lying by her feet. The first package had arrived. Then a second, and then a third made their appearance. The girl was receiving envelopes with hundreds of thousands of heartbeats to go on, plus a lifelong promise. When the promise arrived in a big box, she began to feel a trace of another heartbeat mingled with hers. She didn’t need an explanation to understand.

“It will be impossible to get it back the way I knew it,” she pondered every night in her bed. “If he comes to me someday, to my grayish green city, he will bring me a bigger heart, but we’ll have to share it. I don’t mind, though.”

She smiled then, placing her hand over her chest to feel its silence, picturing life when she would turn left in her horizontal slumbers to find the slow ticking of a piece of soul she had lost so long ago.

Come merge with me—

Evaporate my tears with the warmth of your kisses.

Come walk with me—

Caress my hand while we step on thorns and fiberglass.

Bring an eraser—

Delete the heavy black clouds I tend to draw on the sky with my charcoal.

Bring an umbrella—

We’ll hold on to it and laugh at thunderbolts,

Gleaming in an electric aura.

When the night falls,

When the red city lights dim the stars,

Close your eyes—

Listen to the silence around us,

To the energy that settles on a static lake,

And listen to my murmur—

Come merge with me…