A Clown's Monologue

The crowd's applause was nauseating. It gave me that drunken feeling of self-importance and a pretense facade of popularity. I loved the attention and I still love it now but there are moments in life when you just want to be left alone. Even the most sociable man would want a time for himself.

I'm not really popular but my character is. Children just can't get enough of me. But there are also some who are afraid of this face with a white makeup, don't really know the reason and I don't really care so much for it. For me, as long as there are people who watch my show, I'll perform for them but that was when I was just starting. I was mesmerized with the laughter in the circus that I though living there would be happier. The wide smiles written all over the face of my co-workers had convinced me that life with laughter is a whole lot easier. Yet, I learned that it doesn't make things any better. Its still a life with laughters its just that I didn't know that along with a handful of laughters I have, it comes with a bunch of tears. Sometimes the tears would outweigh the laughters. It was then that I realized that living in a circus is not for sane people. Here, we laughed even though we cry inside. We make people smile, laugh and forget about their problems and yet we, ourselves, couldn't even have the courage to make ourselves smile. Sometimes there's no time to dry our tears for the show is already starting. We are the world's biggest pretenders. If one person wears a mask, we own several of it.

The show must go on, they often say but our show does not end in the stage. It stretched down to our daily life. We are not just clowns in the stage but we are also clowns everyday. People who do not know us expect us to be like that. The stupid stereotypes had branded us with such that even after erasing the white makeup we wore, people still expect us to be funny.

Its funny, isn't it? My life is so funny that I had a life time of laughters. The bitter tears have already mixed up with the tears of joy that I couldn't even differentiate the two. Maybe that's why I look like this, one who couldn't smile and who couldn't cry as well.

date finished: April 2, 2010