The Carousel of Unending Happiness
A drug called childhood, how I found the Carousel and learned to love dizziness
[Artist's depiction by Imogene Larkley]
If you listen, you have a soundtrack in your head. When I lost mine, they sent me away. Upon arrival, I was given headphones, a battery, and an MP3 player, a mere 32 gigabytes of freedom. It would leave my eyes and heart floating outside the bus window, tethered by a string, on a bus that they all say is "short". And slowly I grew like a snail, bursting and screaming in orchestral feelings bubbling up, so much until the bus bursts from around me, shrapnel stabbing into me. Little flickers of blinkers and shards of the rearview mirror cut and scar me, but now I wear them like jewelry.
I began to paint my face, not to hide the shrapnel but to paint what was on the inside. Every step I take, I'm cracked, and when I sleep it's just pins and needles instead of dreams. In the year 1890, the beautiful impressionistic swirling feeling all went dark, dripping from the sky and slipping down the gutter, no one ever listened to him. In 1997, no matter how many songs he wrote, he couldn't soothe what was inside. The cowboy with a sepia-tone heart flew off on a needle he just couldn't forget.
I used to carry a little teddy bear with me, I'd hug him so much he wore out. I'd just stitch him up and put patches on him. I didn't have any fabric, so I would use old newspaper clippings, but after a while, my vision went blurry and I couldn't read them anymore. I realized I was wearing my teddy bear down, so I gave him to Jerry's thrift shop in Salem, that great heap of lost souls and stained glass memories.
Warm cornucopias of feeling in all the autumn shades soon grew cold and mold grew up through them. Tears start in the throat and possess the whole of the skull. Then sparkling, screaming rainbows that never quiet, eat away at all the fruit inside. It all just begins to mock the cold, cold of your fingers. And though I'm so warm inside, no one could ever feel it. I try so many times to share it, even cry a couple of times, but no one hears it. Put on a couple of masks and hide it all the way, but when my rib cage opens like a butterfly and I feel all the feelings that words cannot abide, I feel like my only friend is who you draw on the fogged windowpane of that short, short bus. Again I just press play and 32 gigabytes of freedom sings out. My heart is tethered outside the window of the bus pictured on a crayon-colored sky. On the paper, all I see is fear and monsters. I remember they were happy when I drew them but I just can't feel it anymore. So I'm left hollow and eating leftover magenta crayons.
So, you and I, my dear reader, we slide further and further down. You swallow your soul in a little white pill, 600mg of dizzying sanity. That great healer told you that "you'll feel better", but hell, you sure don't feel like you. I'd pick a flower of feelings, dark and light and everything in between, ash and soil and all the life in between, but when that gets to be too much we just get lost and just want a home. We don't care if we’re a square peg and this home is a round hole or a plastic bed. Now the clown's in full of bright colors, but he really is sad and so we joined him in the center ring, our home-and-home is This Carousel of unending Happiness.
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