THUNDERSTORM AND CIRCUS SWINGS

Copyright: Jack Picone

What a beautiful day. So, yesterday the crazy 12-hour-a-day cramming was over.

So, yesterday someone was saying that one has to be one’s first lover. And weird enough this is something we all know during our most thoughtless years of childhood. Their simplicity and feeling of self-awareness make them in fact the most mature years of our lives.

So, two days ago I had lit a candle for myself and followed the sun down the horizon on its most glorious day: summer’s solstice. Slowly it fell behind the grey chimneys of Holborn and left behind Bordeaux clouds on a gloomy sky. And in their stretch and vigour I saw the extent of the American horizon, of a closer than ever 1997.

So, three days ago I had returned home after the usual full day cramming. And I opened my window, like every night, after shutting it in the morning to prevent crazy british weather to surprise my room with joyful flooding during the day. Like every night I open it to feel the sharp breeze on my cheeks and feel the shivers down my naked arms. And as I glance out, a convulsed motion of swirling flows of rain stuns me: I stare a while to test the strength of the storm. How much do I miss my childhood scares at grandpa’s countryside old home! Now, breathing in the pungent scent of city rain and filling my chest with breeze from the wind dances, I sit on my soft duvet, the silence around me. And only those thunders own the room.

Maybe it’s the cars of central London and not real howls of thorn skies like in grandpa’s house. But in this theater world of virtual realities and realistic fictions, what does it matter whether they are cars or thunders? They are thunders in my ears. And the swirls are storm in my eyes. So I smile, serene, from my bed.

So, today, I will go to the park. Whether rain, whether sun. And if it’s sun, let it be volleyball in the park! I will go to the park and bring with me “Water to Elephants”: a “story of first love, of murder, mayhem and animal and human brutality, of hucksters, whores and the general hoopla created when the circus rolls into town…”. Today I’ll let my circus roll back. The innocence and the rigour of childhood’s flings in the air, the sharp grasp on the thick climbing rope and the tight postures in lifting my body in vertical off it. The beauty, neatness and articulacy of arches shaped hanging down the trapezium.

Let all this come back. Because today is a beautiful day. And, as we knew as kids, and as we shall remind our own daughters in riper years, we are our own first lovers.