An Old Cockney Remembers His Trunk

The past turned its head and grinned. Every year the circus rolled in like a quick storm, and the posters glued to walls boasted elephants, fire eaters, trapeze artists, and clowns. You could feel it before you saw it. Crews shouted across the field, and everything smelled of canvas, rope, and damp grass. It was a jumble of sound, light, and promise. So I leave them where I can see them, and I feel the room answer. Brass corners wink.

Each time I walk by, that inverted grin finds me, as if waiting for the drumroll. And when the kettle rattles and the light slants just so, I think I hear both trunks laugh, and I repeat the truth one more time: a trunk holds a life. I found another trunk in those years, and I just stared. Painted on the panel, a clown face eclipsed by time. It refused to be a flourish. It read like a signature from a vanished road. Not just timber and iron, but a fragment of the travelling circus.

We think of trunks as boxes, but they carried lives before cheap vintage trunk (https://wiki.asexuality.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:RoccoMccloud28) plastic. They were built heavy and honest. Solid frames, steel corners, brass hardware. Some wore brass corners or painted letters. Open one and you don’t just see space, you meet a life. Close it again and it keeps the secret. Sometimes the sea and the sawdust share a bench. One rolled across counties. I run a cloth across both lids. They don’t even sit in the same time, but together they hum low.

That’s how memory moves: in weight. The room holds the hush before the music. I picture the trunk pushed against canvas, stuffed with costumes and props, quiet until the band kicked. All the scuffs on the hinges hint at years of sidings and side streets. You can almost smell powder and brass. And then the internet held up a frame. One evening I found an ArtStation design, and the image mirrored my clown chest. It felt like a new stitch pulling old cloth. The skew of the grin, the way colour sank into wood matched line for line.

For a moment I wondered if the artist had seen mine. Screen to wood, pixel to plank: the ghost was the same joker. These days I see trunks in Shoreditch windows. Turn them into a TV stand. Some call it retro, but I call it honest. A trunk doesn’t stop. If you pass a market and the lid winks, don’t turn your nose at the scar. Take home the box that understands time, and let it start speaking in your rooms.