The Face

There was a clown who put on a happy face. Not many people wanted to see his real face. He came in circuses and busking fairs sometimes. And he had a funny mask. His mask reminded people of a warm sunshine. Yellow and golden and beaming.

Not many people even thought he has a face. Not that he shouldn't but just that it was just better if he didn't. It complicated a lot of things. What wass the harm in overlooking a little of this fact?

Still the same, everybody in the travelling crew loved him.

But today he sat near the water's edge and just sat. He looked at himself in the water and someone sad looked back at him. Who is he that looked so sad? Someone so unlike himself or what the world knew him as. Someone so unlike what he knew himself as. Maybe it was just a ghost. Just a dream. Maybe just a ripple in the water that contorted his face so that his happy face looked sad.

He also painted the massive backdrops for all the drama that happened with the travelling show. And he painted with love from his heart. He drew out of happy memories when he painted. He went back to his happy past, his times of friendship and love, and drew sunshine and flowers and trees out of those thoughts.

People fawned over his creation. Sometimes he enjoyed it. But sometimes, when he was painting it, he felt himself getting colder. Like a bit of sunshine, a bit of warmth has escaped from him, and gone into the painting. That a bit of his soul has moved from his frame to that canvas. And he was getting emptied slowly.

He was just a frame anyway. Just a body. Where the soul chose to come and dwell and make its home. And where life could choose to leave whenever it wanted to.

Today he just sat on the water's edge. Untroubled and unbothered. Unhappy, unsad. Nothing. Like a cold stone that he was sitting on. Like the river that swept past. Like the reflection of the poplars on the water's surface. Like the smokes that lingered from the chimneys.

He looked again at the face reflected back at him, and wondered who he was. Who was this sad man and why does he have this strange feeling that he has seem him before but still looked very unfamiliar.