/ phantom /
a figment of the imagination
"She was like a dark wave crashing upon the bright shores of his horizon."
Anne Wheeler. An outcast. A loner. A street orphan. A disregarded, disgraced child born out of wedlock. A broken girl waiting for a s...
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Fame. Money. Friends.
Anne had it all.
It was anything and everything she had ever dreamed of.
Yet, on the inside, she was a miserable, nervous wreck.
During the day, Anne forced a smile onto her face. She flew through her routines, her dress rehearsals and her performances. She sat in a cramped chair with no armrests for hours at a time, allowing make-up artists and stylists to mould and shape her into an image that she wasn't. She sat with the other performers during meal-times, laughing at jokes and talking about the weather. She would gracefully bow to her cheering audiences and go around the arena hugging the little children and signing people's posters.
But, during the night, she barely slept a wink and would silently cry in the suffocating darkness enveloping her room, her thoughts, her mind. For hours, she would wrestle with the difficult questions that flung to and fro in her brain. Had joining the Barnum Show been the right choice? Had the fame and the money been worth losing her family? Was turning down Philip, who barely talked to her anymore, wrong? What about Bec? Why wasn't he saying or doing anything to reassure her of his feelings? Why were boys so complicated? Why had she thought that she could do whatever the hell she wanted - without any consequences whatsoever?
She was just a poor, peasant girl.
And, at heart, she always would be.
Two long, tiresome, dreary months.
That was how long Anne had forced herself to cope with her new situation. Being suddenly shoved into the spotlight wasn't an easy alternative to her existence as an orphan kid living on the streets. She didn't know how to act, how to talk or even how to show people the real her. She wanted to show the city of New York not Anne Wheeler, the trapeze artist who hid her curly locks and slim body under a taffy wig and purple leotard, but Anne Wheeler, the social outcast who had become a household name, the peasant who had brought herself up out of the ashes of her life's demise.
But, deep down, Anne knew that the public weren't interested in the real her. They were only interested in being entertained. She was merely a toy, a play-thing, in the overall sense of the word.
Stop performing. Stop being liked.
That was that.
As Anne, her knees drawn up to her chest and her long tangle of hair bouncing in front of her eyes, poured out her feelings with a stack of worn parchment and a stubby pencil, she came to the conclusion that she was suffering from anxiety and nervous break-downs.
She was no doctor but she had seen enough of the same symptoms in her grandmother to notice the many similarities in both cases.
Biting down on her lower lip, Anne laid aside her parchment with a heavy-hearted sigh. Sure, she loved Barnum, her friends, trapeze...but what she didn't like was the realisation that, no matter what she achieved or how much she impressed them, she could never fit in with the upper-crust folks of New York.
