confetti

A little secret compartment hidden somewhere behind the ordinary machinery of the world, packed with confetti, rubber monsters, crooked mirrors, cardboard moons, trapdoors, drumbeats, false mustaches, impossible staircases, thunder made with sheet metal, and shapes that could not possibly exist until someone drew them.

Childhood not as innocence, exactly. Innocence is too clean a word for it. Childhood was stranger, louder, darker, funnier. It was the brief period before eimage xperience had been divided into departments.

Before horror was told to stop being funny.

Before comedy was forbidden from becoming frightening.

Before theatricality was dismissed as excess.

Before rhythm was separated from story, story from play, play from art, art from nonsense, nonsense from revelation.

Before adults arrived carrying clipboards and began drawing little boxes around everything.

This is scary.

This is funny.

This is serious.

This is childish.

This is beautiful.

This is grotesque.

This belongs in a museum.

This belongs in the trash.

But childhood did not recognize the borders.

A skeleton could dance.

A monster could be your friend.

A clown could terrify you.

A funeral could contain a joke.

A cartoon could suddenly open onto some bottomless metaphysical terror and then, thirty seconds later, somebody could get hit in the face with a pie.

Everything leaked into everything else.

The world stretched.

It warped.

It reflected itself in funhouse glass and came back with six arms.

Small things expanded until they filled the universe. Enormous fears contracted until they could be trapped inside a cereal box. A bedsheet became a ghost. A cardboard tube became a telescope, a sword, a machine part, a trumpet, a portal. A television set became a window into dimensions whose physical laws were still under negotiation.

Transform.

That was the governing principle.

Not innocence, but transformation.

The ability to encounter an object without accepting its assigned purpose. The ability to experience terror and delight simultaneously without demanding that one cancel the other out. The ability to see the world not as a collection of fixed things, but as raw material.

Stretch it.

Warp it.

Reflect it.

Expand it.

Contract it.

Turn it upside down.

Make the monster sing.

Make the joke bleed.

Give the nightmare a drumbeat.

Throw open the little compartment and let the confetti get everywhere.