The Clown On The Lid

People now call trunks storage, yet once they moved whole families. They were crafted for wagons, ships, and rails. Thick boards, stout hinges, stubborn locks. Some carried names, routes, and crests. Lift the lid and you meet a story, you meet a journey. Close it again and it keeps the secret. So I keep both trunks, and I feel the room answer. Brass corners wink. Whenever I glance over, the clown looks back, as if the evening bell were about to ring. And when I can smell rain in old mortar, I think I hear my trunk breathe, and I remember the only lesson worth the weight: a trunk is never empty.

The past turned its head and grinned. Every year the circus rolled in like a quick storm, and handbills pasted to brick and lampposts advertised elephants, acrobats, jugglers, and those painted clowns. You could feel it before you saw it. Crews shouted across the field, and everything smelled of canvas, rope, and damp grass. It felt like ordinary life had slipped a gear. Sometimes two lives sit shoulder to shoulder on my floor. One knew kettledrums. I read the scratches like scripture.

They don’t even sit in the same time, but together they settle the air. That’s how memory moves: in weight. And then a new mirror landed in my lap. One evening I found an ArtStation design, and the image mirrored my clown traditional chest furniture. It felt like a new stitch pulling old cloth. The tilt of the face, the paint bleeding into the grain matched line for line. I half-believed the artist had stood where I stood. Screen to wood, pixel to plank: the story was the same heartbeat.

I spot travel chests in Hackney lofts and Mayfair halls. Turn them into a TV stand. Some call it distressed, but I call it still beating. A trunk catches breath. If you step into a shop and see one, don’t turn your nose at the scar. Take home the box that understands time, and watch it stand another fifty years. One day I came across a circus trunk, and my hands forgot what to do. A clown stared back, inverted and bold, grin part-faded. It was more than paint.

It read like a signature from a vanished road. Not just timber and iron, but a fragment of the travelling circus. The room holds the hush before the music. I picture the trunk pushed against canvas, packed with jackets, clubs, and tin makeup pots, waiting for the show to begin. All the scuffs on the hinges hint at years of sidings and side streets. You can almost feel the rush before the ringmaster’s call.