Tears of a Clown

Two baths a day keeps the blues (and everything else) away. One mid-morning and one in the later evening. It is SUCH a total waste of time and it is all I can do. I feel the day's unproductive sweat warming my skin, the dust and the sebum seeping from my pores. I feel both refreshed and exhausted from the soap and just hot tap, each time. Never replenished. Lying down on my bed to air dry afterwards, both times and fall into a conscious open-eyed sleep. When other people's hands have run over my skin after making love, they’ve told me it's so soft and I understand now it's because I air dry, lying naked in the foetal position with a towel protecting the sheet and another draped over me. I murmur in polite response but don’t tell them my secret.

When I can go outside, I buy self-help books and find them helpless. I leave them at train stations to turn other people's lives around. I wander listlessly, a pink lipgloss smile plastered onto my face that’s already ready to crumble into tears. I wear bright colours to hide how much I am grieving. Nobody has died, apart from a life, I would have had if I was just different. Polka dots, dogtooth, gingham and other clashing prints are a great distraction. Look at me I am a cheerful person I promise. There is joy in my life, there is so so much to be grateful for. Are you okay? The barista asks in the coffee shop. I am crying and I can’t explain why. I know what bought it on, I don’t know what coffee to choose. I’m fine, I am so sorry, just received some bad news. Thank you, thank you, just a flat white, please. I jitter all day. I forgot I wanted a tea.

I haven’t. No bad news, no hook to hang this heaviness on. Nobody has died. I am not heartbroken. It’s just there - this fog that sits right at the top of my head, synchronously weighing me down and pulling me around life like a puppeteer. I carry a yoga mat around twice a week so no one can suspect how lost and ungrounded I am.

I start to wonder if my personal melancholy is down to an unfulfilled urge or quirk or hobby I am not aware of. I play darts at the pub and nothing sparks. I take a quiz on WhatsYourKink.org. The questions ask things like —

If you were a duck would you get pleasure in being thrown bits of stale bread by your partner whilst floating in a small pool of water/your partner's urine?

I snap my laptop shut. I go on some internet dates, from apps specialised for men with beards because I have only slept with people with no facial hair. As I arrive on a date I see the man has a tissue box with him on the table and I don’t want to ask about it in case it's insensitive or something. Maybe his hay fever is bad or something. But it's not even summer. I burst into tears in the ladies' toilet, wiping my nose and face with the scratchy cheap toilet paper. I make my eyes and nose red. I wish I had one of his kind to skin Kleenex. I come out and say I have to leave. Because I have hay fever. I try stand-up comedy and I love it. And I’m good at it. My first 5 gigs I smash. My 6th I bomb but I keep on, and I only get better. My loud dress sense and quirky anecdotes about trying darts, the kink website and the bearded tissue box man date land well with the crowds of ten audience members in little rooms above pubs. But my emptiness isn’t filled ever and I am still faking joy every day. I might as well tattoo two magpies across my forehead. Then I meet someone. I’m at a gig early and there’s a man with a guitar case, sitting at the bar drinking an IPA. He has long dirty blond hair and looks like Kurt Cobain. He’s beautiful, he’s an artist, a poet, a scruffy god. He stays for the gig and he laughs at my joke. He laughs. He laughs and I want to cry again but not from my sorrow this time. This could be what's been coming for me. Yes to fall in love with an artist. He will write his songs about me, play for me guitar at night, we can share our ideas and dreams and fears and have each other.

He asks for my number and we start dating. He wants to take it slow and it makes it feel so beautiful. He tells me about his childhood pet. A little black cat called Bat. He told me how after she died at 18, he was sure he could hear his mum's fridge sometimes purring, just like she did. “The Bat in the Fridge” I gasp, “hey that would make a great song!”. His lips curl into a smile and he leans forward and kisses me on the lips, firmly but like a gentleman would. I adore him. We’re dating for a month when he starts to invite me to stay the night. I love his little room, his dirty sheets, the smell of old incense, the lava lamp, the cigarette butts in the ashtray on the floor by the bed, the piles of washing and festival posters selo-taped to the peeling wallpaper. They are from the 70s before we were born but that just makes them even more compelling. I could roll around in his mess all day long. But I usually have to leave in the morning because he works at a second-hand video game shop. I hold his hand each morning as we walk there together, as he chugs from a BBQ beef pot noodle he made before we left in the morning. He hands to me, gives me a big gorgeous smelly noodley kiss and heads into work. I smile as I toss the pot into the bin and miss. I don’t care, I’m the happiest luckiest girl in the entire town. I skip off and go and write some more stand-up.

One day we sleep in. My beautiful scruffy rock star man jumps out of bed, late for work, pulls on some dirty jeans and his floral shirt with the missing buttons, and runs out the door spraying on some lynx. Last night he’d smoked a lot from his homemade bong, writing loads in his notebook, I pretended to write stand-up but really just browsed big spotty yellow trousers on the internet, happily inhaling his fumes. He caught me and laughed Nice Clown Pants hahahahaahahahaha. He always says American things when he’s stoned. I love all his laughs but I love his drug laughs the best. Darling! You are as baked as a cake!! I exclaim jumping into his arms. I didn’t want to ruin his flow by talking about mundanities, so I never set his alarm clock — My job in our relationship. I spend the morning swimming around his sheets, tumbling around the duvet and mismatched cushions and pillows, inhaling in his scent. Weed and musky yummy boys fragrance smell. Mmmmm. I stretch out slowly onto the floor like a cat. His notebook fell open on the floor and I see some lyrics. Well, they are just drawings of that silly graffiti S that everyone did on their exercise books at school, and written over and over again in different sizes - my bitch has a red nose, my bitch has a red nose, my bitch has a fat ass and big red fat nose. I rub my nose. Hm. Maybe he’s working on some rap. He’s so diverse. I lean onto his beautiful guitar case rubbing my palms and cheeks against the leather. I sing out “Just me, my dignity and this guitar case Woah, woaaaaaahhhh”, trying to sound like Amy…. I love when lyrics mirror life. I open it, I want to touch the string he uses to execute his divine creativity.

The guitar isn’t there. It’s just filled with old pennies, Rizla papers, pens and more dirty rags. I snap it shut. I press my lips together. I look around in the dusty morning light. There’s no other musical paraphernalia in his life. No guitar pics, no amps, no gig posters with his beautiful face on. I dress, remove my things from my small pile near the window. I write a note under his rap in the notebook — I’m Sorry, I can’t, don’t hate me. Like in Sex and The City. I am sad but I do love it when telly mirrors life. I go back to my bath and weep like before.

The yellow spotty trousers arrive the next day and I wear them all the time. I start to change my make-up. Fresh start. I stop using bronzer and just apply a little circle of rouge to each cheek. I stop doing big wings of eyeliner and just do little triangles under my bottom row of eyelashes. I stop using lip gloss and just paint my cupids bow and the middle of my bottom lips with a bright red lip stain. I dye my hair blue. Badly, I stain my neck and the shower curtain. My set starts to become more abstract. It’s mainly just me screaming obscenities down the microphone whilst fairground music I’ve mixed with punk tinkles out of the sound system. The audience takes it in but looks scared when they laugh. I feel weird. I decide to leave London to see my grandparents and make things feel less intense, softer, cleaner. With sugary tea and biscuits in jars and sewing kits in biscuit tins, and the tennis playing on the telly. I sit at my Nanna’s feet and let myself cry unashamedly. It feels better than my empty cries before. Nan strokes my fading blue hair, dark roots creeping through. I haven’t explained what's wrong, I’ve never had to. “Why does it have to be so sad Nanna?” I wail. There’s a pause and I wait for something wise and compelling, like a film. “Sweetness, I don’t know why it is so sad, it's just the way it is.” My grandad clears his throat and we both look up,

“Why is she dressed like a clown love?”.

Image by Obelisk Art History - Clown Smoking by Armand Henrion