He was the best of mimes, he was the worst of mimes. A routine he’d learned well as a child was his only act, and he knew it, down to his bones he knew it, but it grew thin in these colder times. Seemed as how he’d always been dancing to his silent tune, but the boy he’d been had cast a different shadow and walked another path. It was the little things, mostly, that he couldn’t escape from. No, it wasn’t something that a person should be feeling responsible for, just the changes wrought by time, and the influences he didn’t know he’d felt. He wasn’t the same boy – mind you, none of us are really the same – and his silent little play had modulated, grown wings you might say, or lost its nerve you might say, and neither truer than the other.
You’d hardly call him a commercial success – not him, not a mime, his only stage the street and his props department conjured with gestures and dismissed with flicks. Yet he still had this feeling, with him for some time now, that he had lost something back there which he wouldn’t be able to find again. The crowd liked his show more, now, but he’d left something behind to find that place. It itched in his memory, so much as you’d call it a memory, fragments of a song once heard on a radio. It replayed the same few words, like a misshappen haiku, that seemed to float in the realm just behind his movements. He couldn’t quite tell what it was. The shape of it eluded his fingertips.
Only, he had this sensation like it had been something important.