User:BethHarada0678

London became home after a long ship from Jamaica. The voyage tuned my heartbeat to the tide. One memory that refuses to loosen: a trunk carries a life inside it.

When we come across the water, all we owned fit a single trunk. It was cold steel outside. The handles bit my palms with a worker’s truth.

It’s easy to miss the point, but those trunks were built for storms. Every crease in the metal was a night shift on a dock. Watch old films and you’ll see it.

I learned the shopkeepers by their voices, and it held fast like a parish bell. Records, buttons, keepsakes: the trunk hid them when I needed quiet.

Years later, another memory took hold. Every year the circus rolled in like a quick storm, and the posters glued to walls boasted elephants, fire eaters, trapeze artists, and clowns. Anticipation walked ahead of the drums. Wagons rattled the kerbs, and a tang of rope and canvas drifted everywhere. It was a jumble of sound, light, and promise.

I met a trunk that smelled faintly of greasepaint, and the floor under me felt like boards on a wagon. Across the front was a hand-drawn clown, upside down. It was more than paint. It felt like a voice from a lost world. Not just timber and iron, a splinter of that wandering life.

The old workshop where I keep it still hums. I imagine it wedged between crates, stuffed with costumes and props, 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.

And then a pixel waved to grain. One evening I found an ArtStation design, and it showed a clown suitcase storage trunk that matched mine. The memory walked in wearing fresh boots. The odd inversion, the softened edges of age matched line for line. I half-believed the artist had stood where I stood. Poster to panel, glare to patina: the ghost was the same joker.

We treat trunks like containers, yet once they moved whole families. They were built heavy and honest. Timber sides, iron straps, deep latches. Some wore brass corners or painted letters. Lift the lid and you meet a story, you meet a life. Set it down and the floor remembers too.

These days I see trunks in Shoreditch windows. People use them at the end of a bed. Some call it vintage trunk, but I call it honest. A trunk catches breath. If you pass a market and the lid winks, don’t turn your nose at the scar. Choose the chest that already knows your name, and let it start speaking in your rooms.

Sometimes the sea and the sawdust share a bench. One came across oceans. I read the scratches like scripture. They don’t even sit in the same time, but together they make a chord. That’s how memory moves: in the patience of a latch.

I’ve earned my living with things that outlast moods. Sometimes I think it infects a room until every shadow hums. When I trace the paint, I’m taking attendance. Windrush to ringmaster, the stitch looks rough but it will not part.

So I leave them where I can see them, and I set a cup of tea nearby. Timber settles. And every time I pass, the upside-down clown catches my eye, as if waiting for the drumroll. And when a neighbour’s radio leaks last year’s hits, I think I hear my trunk breathe, and I nod to the lids like old friends: keep it safe, keep it near, keep it true.