Enchanted creatures. Locked in my closet, they stayed; in a teak wooden land filled with fresh green leaves. It rained there, like it never did here, not anymore. It rained with water drops sparkling with light, clouds darkened by the maudlin worlds and it rained to wash away all that was untowards. The leaves glimmered with rain. The placed smelled of greenery, fresh greenery, fresh rain and the mirthful laughter of winds. You had to stand there only to realise how bleak my world was. How utterly chaotic my world is. You simply had to take a step into my closet and you'd meet them. Those enchanted creatures, with wings of white and black and crimson and blue.
But would anyone believe in them? Across circuses of bright colors, larger tents and talking animals, was there anyone to believe in these enchanted creatures? Uncle did magic, magic with a wand, the swish of a wand into the hat and out came a rabbit. Was that magic? Yes, I thought so. Running about the fields full people, each of whom stared with awe at the black top hat with a red ribbon, I thought it was magic. I thought my uncle was a magician. When the cards flew about the circus floor, when the girl, whom I never liked was cut in pieces and I gleamed with joy, returned to herself, I thought all was magic. There was magic, in the way the horses spoke, the way the sun covered the moon, the way I went to sleep and woke up to find daylight. Crazy, maybe I was, to wish for the night to stay.
I was sent to bed in the caravan, about as soon as the night creatures called. And once, I'd sneaked out of the caravan when the moon was high upon the sky. It wasn't hard, the door was never locked, people were up at all hours. It wasn't hard, because I needed no sleep. I hardly ever woke till daylight screamed through the grimy windows. But this one night, I thought I'd run to the night and fly away with it to wherever it went into hiding. I'd follow it, I'd find its secret and I'd engulf the world in everlasting darkness. I tried too. I dodged everyone to reach that rock at the far end of the circus and I waited till I thought the world was quieter. And then I ran to the moon. I ran and ran. And I climbed. Even as the moon feinted, I climbed. I tried. But I never managed.
I never liked daylight, you see. Daylight was for others, who enjoyed what I despised. The sun brought with it large bold colors. Red, stark red, and yellow and orange and green and purple. The sun came with the rainbow, only with a horrible twist. The rainbow was evil, the rainbow was brightness, ones that hurt your eye. The day was screaming, and crying and refusing to make a spectacle of myself. The light meant makeup, pounds and pounds of makeup, of wearing costumes I did not fit into, of being away from the mountains I loved to hide in - where it was dark and quiet and lonesome. I hated the day, I still do. I hate it as I right this and I'll hate it when the sun shines above my grave, as I lie cold and rotten, eaten by maggots.
And into this life of wishing for the night, of performing with distaste, of listening to arguments and petty fights, of grime and no food, came the closet.. A teak wood closet with two doors that opened up to you. It was not very large, to put it truthfully. But I found a world in there. Early in the days, I would have to stand on tiptoes to reach to the handles and unlatch it with great determination to peer inside. And thats when I met the other world. The ones with the enchanted creatures. I never went there, though. Never tried.
Because I could hardly believe them to be true.
Maybe it was this living in a circus, this existance that deceived and believed in its own art, in which the truth was only what not a proven lie, that the closet purchase came as no suprise, no serious uproar. Neither did anyone think of asking me, what I would think, when the closet blocked the only window I ever saw through, the only window which let the moonlight through, deep in the middle of the night when the silver orb with its spinning lady spun tales for me. It was to be the quarters of all our clothes and all our props that made our table, that made my pillows for the couch in which I was to sleep had long since lost its sponges. I was enraged that night, when I heard them talk of the closet over the crackling of the fire. I was astounded, could I not even have that much privacy in this land? A land in which I belonged to about as well as any living nightmare.
The closet was welcomed with despise from me. I looked at it being hauled in, its top hitting the door top and it looked hurt. I saw my couch shifted into a corner and the closet taking up space where air had been, where my friend, the wind had whistled through. And I stared at the closet, sitting straight ahead, hugging my knees, I stared at night, for nights at end, determined not to show it my fury. I wouldn't open it, I wouldn't keep things on it and by the end of three days, pretty much everybody had lost interest in storing the millions and gazillions of materials that just lay about the caravan, ready to be tripped upon.
And then, one evening, my neice, barely five and learning to walk the rope came in with a request that I had promised myself not to fulfill. "Open the door," she cried, even before she had spoken, "I need the new rope." And I glanced at her, with distaste, before staring at my reflection on the mirror. Mounds of makeup, it screamed, mounds of it. Who was I beneath all that? I hardly knew how I looked. It was always a distortion, always. Makeup or a grimy mirror, or a flowing river current. I never quite knew how I looked. And my niece screamed again, "The closet!" She stomped. "I won't open it," I announced flatly and took a swab of cotton soaked with some astringent that made my face itch. "But I NEED the rope," she said, wrecking our caravan. I hated her, I decided then, and if only to appease my love for silence, I grudgingly got up and opened the closet.
But I did not peer inside.
Until, I thought, I caught a flash of white shoot across. Inside a closet.
It doesn't matter, does it, how I came to know them all? Just knowing them suffice whatever great logic there maybe. I miss them, you know. Everytime i see what I see now, I miss them. I look at it fondly, wishing they were here just like they were the first time they came, the first time they stepped outside that closet and we spent the night breathing in the beauty of the world. It all happened, like my life never happened and it was all real, much like my life was not. What is real in a circus tent? Where you don't know one parent from the other, one sister from a brother, one kindly face from another. I knew them all, those who performed and those who came to visit and sneaked in through the curtains never paying the fees. I knew the tricks, could do more than one. I laughed at them when I could fathom the joy, and I sulked when I was stuck, and I performed because I had to, because sore joints and bruises only led to worse joints and bruises. There was nothing real in that, nothing beautiful in the way they were, nothing half as hearty as they were.
They never left, you know, but then they did. I don't know how. I stared at the closet the night I saw the streak of white. Much like I stared at it any other night. But this day, it was not with distaste and not with despise, nor was it with acceptance. It was with intrigue. It was with realisation that the closet really did breathe when I felt it did, that the closet really beckoned to me in the nights within my dreams when i thought it did. Could it be true, I thought, as my hands lay clutched on my lap, fiddling with the end of my well worn top. The doors seemed to hiss, as though a storm raged on the other end. I looked to the wall that should have been the window and wondered what my silver friend would say. Open the door to this imagination or keep the nightmare hidden, hidden till it could no more. There was no wind either, my only other friend, no whistles and no music apart from the cacaphony that raged outside. Uncle was shouting, uncle was lost to consciousness like so many others, aroudn the blazing fire. Would they care if the storm wreaked havoc in the only world they or me knew? I wondered.
Sometimes I thought they would be happier dead than they were now. Each step was tense and strung , like walking along the tight rope. each day was a life of living through another makeshift, another political crisis, another day of moulding laws and regulations to suit needs and another day without food for subsistence, without respect for friendship. They hated us, the villagemen. Circus was a scum, the lowest scum of all. We were worms, creeping into their lives, destroying what they held sacred. Made sense, why they would visit. Why so many each day visited, why ours was the fest to join when it came spring. I never understood villagemen, never tried, never would bother. Since the day I left school for sleep and its peace, I never regretted not having to meet people who did not look at me the way the villagemen did.
I was happy to be with the moon, the mountain and the wind. The water at times. And I was overjoyed to have opened the closet doors on that day of storm and stare awkwardly at the tall figure in white who happened to crash upon my caravan floor. He turned, or rather, it turned for I have no idea what it was apart from an enchanted creature. It fell, this long slender figure with long white hair that fell upon its wings, giant white wings that took up almost all space there. I blinked, I pinched my knee, I stared, I gawked but i could not make sense. Was this schizophrenia, I asked myself, it could not be real. It didn't belong even when it fell. It did not step even when it did step. It was this twist of the world, a blend of the reality to the magic, the true magic adn the world resisting. It smiled when I lost consciousness and it peered when i came to and jumped back and acquired that nasty jolt on my head.
That's when I realised it was true, that it was real.
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Submission Name: The Closet.
