Freakshow: Social Animal

Maybe he had had a name, before he became what he had become. Maybe that had been the case with all of them, before their roles had been assigned.

Mary, John, Robert, Lucia, Paul, maybe they all had had a life they could attach to such names, a self that had been born at a regular, middle-class family, then gone to school, suffered through high school, married the guy or girl they liked but not the one they loved, and eventually had landed a job that was close to the dream one but not quite it.

Maybe they had all been caught by their early thirties depression in the midst of conformity and had felt the dissatisfaction of routine and normality rotting their proper and unparticular insides.

It was perhaps that way that Mary, John, Robert, Lucia and Paul, with a little bit of imagination, had become what they had become. They had all somehow communally reached a moment of enlightenment and had tossed their selves and names aside to take to roles that fitted their frames more tightly.

Maybe that had been the case and it all came to a forgotten and dismissed persona, but if he had to be truly honest and took the time to compare the cases, it was highly unlikely. Even when their voyeuristic visitors would only refer to them by their defining abnormality when, back in their safety of their homes, they would tell their tales and the wonders they had witnessed to both friends and family; even when it was certain that the part they played was the one that was going to be summoned in those wisps of immortality, most of the god-forgotten freaks that made his reign insisted on having names they could call their own, little fragments of individuality they clung to in all its futility.

Looking back on it, and actually paying attention to all the other cases, the only one who was absolutely lacking of a personal noun was no one but himself. And he highly doubted he had once been a John or Robert. Not even a Mary for that matter. He doubted even more he had ever been unsatisfied with the lot that had been assigned to him, the whole idea of an existential void taking over his life in some distant, faded particle of his past being a completely foreign feeling.

As far as he remembered, and he did take pride in having quite a good memory, he had been nothing but one thing, and had loved his life just as utterly and completely as he loved himself.

As far as his thoughts could go back to, in the dim places of dusted memories of bright colours first seen, he had always been one and the same, and had announced his self to the skies during every single show, his voice deep and commanding bouncing against the curves of the tent: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I am The Ringleader, welcome to my Circus”, and all his little freaks had bowed and crawled at his feet while the audience hung eagerly from a twist of his wrist for that electric moment in which, with a flicker and blur, his whip would crack against the arena and, with their awed gasp and a shower of confetti, the show would begin.

So screw Mary, John, Robert, Lucia and Paul, and screw existentialist ramblings. As far as he could tell (and there was no one there able to tell him otherwise) he had no name but what he was.

Just like God.