THE THEATER OF MASKS

THE THEATER OF MASKS

The only thing left for the belated childhood is the nostalgy of a world which is lost far away in time, a world that can’t be accessed anymore. The late childhood is uselessly missing the toys, because now it can only see them through an always closed window, as unaccessible as the windows of the luxury toys stores are for the poor children. And then, the late child, lost in a too complicated and heavy world of the grown-ups, starts making his toys alone, building them from the daydreams foam...

        At the beginning, there are only the faces in the mirror – identical, yet never repeated, like the fingerprints that seem so similar while keeping their amazing uniqueness.
        Then, the play of masks starts... When you try to keep for a while the faces from the mirror, or to remember them... and for this, you need to know them better, to understand what is the difference between one and the other...
        And so, you start understanding that their eyelashes blink in different rhytms, that no one of them breathes the same way as the other... and slowly the masks get their own colors... violent or light, dark or soft... Because the personality of a mask is not only its "look" given by the long or round eyes, by the up or down mouth’s corners...
        A mask is actually a face reduced to a maximum simplicity, the synthesis of a biography... and only if you really know how to look at them, carefully and patiently, you will discover that they carry along joys and sadnesses, victories and defeats... that they have a past and a name...
        That’s maybe why only children actually know how to play with them... because only the eyes of their soul are really open to see and understand...

But the fate of the child refused by his childhood is always the same : while his toys are destroyed, he should be punished for having tried to save them, for having dared to play...

•

• •

        The theater of masks burnt one cloudy spring morning. It burnt in silence, as the mourning soul of the child too quickly grown up, changing the masks into ashes. Only their names that could not burn, fell into the dust, broken and senseless.
        That morning, a little girl had gone down on the empty beach, had kneeled close to the sea and played for a while, then she had stood up and had gone, leaving behind a little sand pile with a seagull feather stuck in the middle of it, like the ritual feathers reminding of the Indians’ graves.
        The girl had left without turning her head. As she was going farther along the beach, through the foggy light of the morning, her outline started to seem more and more like the shadow of a woman walking more and more slowly while going farther, as the grave of the broken wings would have called her back.
        But the path was one-way, since what has been buried once would never rise again... and the girl was getting older with every step taking her far away from what she had buried there, looking weaker and more and more burdened...
        ... because, although one’s burden gets lighter with each thing they lose on the way, only the soul does not know to obey this rule... but gets heavier and heavier when it has to carry along, through life, fewer pieces of light.

© Copyright reserved
No part(s) of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, transcribed, stored in a retrieval system, or translated into any language in any form by any means without the written permission of the author.

Romanian version

E-mail me