Circus Act
Roll up the tent and tame the lions and don't forget to pay rent
Traveling Act
First there is the move. There is nothing worse than this. Clearing out a space, going through every single item you own, facing your own useless sentiment towards things your life would be better without but stupid emotion prevents you from ridding yourself entirely of.
I wear one set of earrings, one watch, two rings and four necklaces in rotation. One set of sandals, sneakers, three pairs of boots (rain, fancy tall, fancy short) and two pairs of heels. I’ve compressed my closet to a science, no plastic, no water. My toiletries are bar shampoo and conditioner so I never need more than a carry-on. Yet each time I move, I’m drowning in things. Reluctantly all the bits and pieces of my life get shoved into another bag. If I lived a simpler life, I would go at a moment’s notice. Unfortunately, my things cling onto me like Peter Pan’s shadow, tying me to the spot I belong, Earth.
The new location is temporary, at 5pm exactly, I ring the doorbell, make a phone call and get swept into the strangest experience there ever was. The circus act has moved from a tiny apartment to a spacious townhome and I’ve swapped the boys for old ladies. The house is all parquet flooring, stained glass french doors, and heavy wooden furniture - there is even a manicured backyard and a fig tree. Upon entering, I am immediately brought into the kitchen offered cake and prosecco and by 6:30 I am drunk, sending Jillian and Abigail the most incoherent texts of all time. Up two flights of stairs, I am brought to a tiny room that obviously belonged to a boy - the wall next to the bed is red, the background for a massive Polish Eagle, there is an electric guitar in the corner and my door is covered in obscene vinyl stickers. I take it.
Though in this house, I am a street cat feigning domesticity. The ladies are kind and obsessively clean. But I run my life at the edges and jump from work to my friends and dinners and activities. Like a cheating husband, I come home every night to a dark house, bedroom doors closed and I carefully creep up three floors of dreadfully squeaky stairs. When I leave in the morning, everyone is gone already. No one texts. No one calls
.
"Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there" - Aleksandar Hemon
On the Road
I have moved 12 times in the past six years and we are fast approaching 13. I find myself travelling yet again. The dusty road to new adventures is tumultous. Mine includes delayed flights, cocktails at the airport lounge, a drunk romanian woman, a nice boy from Venezuela on the plane next to me who puts my number in his phone as “wife”. I take a bus to the subway to the airplane to a car to a sailboat.
And the key to every good circus involves setting up a tent. A big blue sail goes up in my backyard. I unpack my things.
The Show
300 flowers litter our house and quite the crowd turns up for the event. For one night only you can see the woman who moved from Poland to Siberia and back and then to the United States. She is 90 and holds court from 3pm until 11pm. There is family and people from our past I haven’t seen in years. My aunt becomes aware that she will soon be an empty nester. There are even clowns at this show, a man who was not welcome two years ago invites himself over to stay with my parents for two months. The Greek Man comes with his baby. Small children do cartwheels through the crowd. There is even a real live photographer at this event, to document the chaos. And by some strange twist of fate, the number of Yale friends who have visited me in Chicago rises to 5. Auspicious.
Ringmaster
And then there is always the question, who runs the show? It sometimes comes out to seem that I run the show. And indeed, I order flowers, mow the lawn, assemble my grandmother, fly in cakes, help my father lay flooring and answer questions that flow in. But it all becomes obvious when the cake comes out.
My mother suddenly vanishes and just like that - panic ensues - who should cut the cake? My father will not and I cannot convince my sibling to do it. So we set off to find the Adult-In-Charge. My mother. Julia listens to my endless ramblings and I get that much closer to her. We talk of finding wall studs, of having to pick up the pieces of a family. I’m not quite sure how it is in other cultures, but here the women always run the show. There was never a question of gender roles, if my father was working on the car, I was there to help. But the vacations, the extracurriculars, the play dates, the remodels, the car purchases, the garden, the food we ate? My mother called all the the shots - I am just the stagehand.
Closeout
I look over at my travelling companion as he asks me what my maximum number is for the oldest I would date, I dance around an answer and I tell him I’ve never really thought about that. In the loose ends of my life, I would like to have one strand tied down, knowing I have people to return to, but the rest are not ready to be anywhere but tangled in the open winds. Suddenly, a little sticky hand grabs mine and pulls me to the dance floor to show me his light-up sneakers. I find myself wondering who in the crowd has lost their monkey, because, to my knowledge, I do not have any children.
I find myself in church at the end of the month. I’m not sure what brings me here, but I always find a little more stability in this place. During the sermon, the priest announces that he organizes a sailing trip for an orphanage in Poland every year through the Mazury. Perhaps some tiny portion of this circus act began there, where I read stories of a goat who left to search the world to find something that was very close by. This is all speculation. A circus act has to keep moving on to support itself and this show is packing up again and moving in two weeks time
.
Tidbits of July
There are 4 jet streams around the globe!
Look up what a derecho is. And you thought tornados were bad…
Down: Hours of sleep, time wasted
Up: Miles walked, steps taken
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