Laura Mega, “The Man With the Circus Inside

The Man With the Circus Inside

Laura Mega

Ican still remember a certain man, a dreamer. He had the power to transform fantasy into the most beautiful reality you could ever envision. As most dreamers tend to, he decided to travel as far as he could to reach the Big Apple where, if it was true that real love existed, he would find it there. Sometimes, emotions eat at our thoughts and distress our heart, sometimes they just explode inside. All the love for this city had taken the form of an inner circus that the man lived with every day of his life. A circus with its jugglers, the fire eater with the burnt tongue, the tightrope walkers hovering over invisible threads, clowns with garish, grinning faces but tears in their hearts; a dwarf with fishnet stockings who was trying to ride a lion and a lion that lashed his fear so that it would leap through the circle of fire. A show where no ticket is sold at the entrance and the old sage’s beard becomes soft cotton candy. A circus of fools because in New York normality does not exist. This Big Rotten Apple that put a spell on all of us, that Apple you can eat or lick little by little but always ends up biting you back, and it often happens when you would never expect. One day, the King of the Fools told the man to leave the Apple and it was like someone asked him to not breathe the air anymore, like being suffocated, as if he were taken away by the clowns through some horrible magic trick. The distance made him shed so many tears, tears he did not even know he had. Even from far away, he still has the circus inside of him. And if you look deep in his eyes you can also see the fire eater with the burnt tongue, the tightrope walkers hovering over invisible threads, the clowns, the dwarf trying to ride the lion and the lion that lashed his fear so that it would leap through the circle of fire. But if you ask him to stop crying on the outside, he will give you always the same answer.

I don’t know how to stop. I don’t know how to stop.