The Juggler

Fluorescent balls flash through the air in a continuous cycle as the juggler works their hands. Tossing and catching, tossing and catching. Never enough time between tosses for a break. The lunch-hour smells of the market don’t faze the juggler. Neither does the honking traffic, or the sharp-dressed people hurrying back to work, take out in hand, phones pressed to their ears. Even as the crowd gathers around them, applauds at each entertaining break of the cycle, the juggler’s focus never shifts. An increased speed, an additional ball, a feigned struggle. The crowd goes wild and the juggler juggles. Tossing and catching, tossing and catching. I’ve passed the juggler every day since I started working this job site five weeks ago. And every day I’ve stopped briefly to observe the act. A fleeting five minutes of entertainment to fill the only free five minutes of my day.

“You there,” the juggler says. Their eyes lock on me. For a moment, I’m too impressed to look away. They’re tossing and catching, tossing and catching, but their eyes are on me, never glancing at their hands or the balls rising and falling above them. Finally I break eye contact, pretend not to care. It’s too late. The juggler has chosen me. The crowd turns to me too.

“Hold this for me, will ya,” the juggler says. Before I can decline, the ball is in the air, flying towards me from fifteen yards away. A perfect toss.

Either the juggler can’t tell by my reflective vest and the hard hat tucked under my arm that I’m not supposed to be here, or they don’t care. And I have half the mind to turn and leave. My lunch break is ticking down to its final moments. Do I wish I didn’t have to work this job, sure, but do I hate it? No. I’d hate to lose it and re-enter the strain of the job hunt. But the ball floats through the air and I, its target.

The crowd watches the small yellow ball in anticipation like it is the sun and it is about to fall out of the sky. I open my hand, catch it. The crowd doesn’t gasp or clap. They turn, like me, to face the juggler again. Two balls, one orange and one green, trade places in and above the juggler’s right hand while their left hand retrieves two more from their bag. Now they’re juggling four. Orange, green, purple, and red rise and fall in front of them. I wait for them to tell me to toss the ball back, but the request doesn’t come. Instead, the orange ball flies towards me. I flinch. The hardhat cracks against the concrete when I drop it to catch the ball. As soon as I do, the juggler throws another my way. It’s in the air, hanging in front of me, and I have to decide what to do. My hands are full now, orange in one hand, yellow in the other. If I hold on to them both, I won’t be able to catch the purple one hurtling towards me. But if I drop either, I might lose them all.

I toss yellow into the air as purple comes down. I catch it. It’s only after the crowd’s surprised cheer that I realize I was supposed to toss the yellow ball back to the juggler. Instead, I tossed it up to myself and now I’m juggling, same as the juggler across from me. The repeating cycle of tossing and catching, tossing and catching, tossing and catching, feels foreign to me at first. At each toss or each catch, I might bobble, drop a ball, and the crowd will gasp in horror. But when I don’t bobble, the crowd cheers, muffled in my ears behind the thump, thump, thump of my heart. But I like it.

I juggled minimally during high school baseball a decade ago, but the technique returns to me and I’m tossing and catching, tossing and catching, tossing and catching. The crowd’s eyes are on me. My chest is warming, cheeks tightening into a grin. It’s the variation to my routine that awakens something inside of me. Something I have not felt in a long while. But as the balls rise and fall, rise and fall, a phrase jumps into my mind; What goes up must come down.

And then my phone vibrates in my pocket. I keep juggling. Who will I have to find the time to call back later? Is it my parents, asking when I will be home to visit? My older brother, suggesting I meet my new nephew soon? My younger brother wants to fly out to visit. But that would mean I’d have to clean the house, convert the guest bedroom back into a guest bedroom from the storage space it is now, ask for a Friday off, plan an itinerary, plan meals, pick him up from the airport, lose a weekend worth of chores, make up the time throughout the week after. But I’d like to see my brother. I never call. Wish I had the time.

The vibration stops and I refocus on the tossing and catching, tossing and catching, tossing and catching. The juggler is no longer in front of me. I glance carefully around to find them, but can’t. The juggler is nowhere in sight, but the crowd remains, watching me dance before them.

My phone vibrates again. Probably a voicemail from whichever caller I just missed. My lunch break must be over by now. Maybe it was my supervisor, wondering where I am, wondering if I’m coming back. Maybe I’m not. After all, I am the juggler now. If I were to leave, go back to work, grab groceries after, go home, shower, cook dinner, wash dishes, tell my partner about my day, listen to theirs, do a load of laundry, scroll the Zillow, take the dog out, practice guitar… well let’s be real, I haven’t had time to practice guitar in months. If I did all those things, what would the crowd do? Who would they watch juggle? Where would they find their brief moment of entertainment in their busy routine of same-old same-old?

“You’re very good at that,” someone says from the crowd. I don’t take my eyes off the balls to see who. Tossing and catching, tossing and catching, tossing and catching. “Have you been practicing for a long time?”

“No. Not at all,” I say. “But I feel like I’ve been doing it forever.” And I do. I think of the chores I have yet to do after work today, or if not today, they’ll hang over me until I can get around to them. Garage needs cleaning, grass needs mowing, grandma needs calling. I probably should have called her a week ago. And a week before that. And a week before that. She turns ninety-eight next month and I haven’t seen her since Christmas. There are a dozen read, but unreplied to text messages in my phone from a dozen different friends I’ve failed to keep in touch with. A little red bubble with the number three-hundred-seventeen hovers over the envelope icon on my home screen, reminding me how many emails I have waiting in my inbox. Most of them are junk, but a good deal of them are from my mom, or friends I told I would get back to, or blogs and articles I wanted to read, told myself I was going to read. I told myself I was going to read more books too, but there’s a stack of them on my bookshelf still crisp as the day they were printed. I was supposed to write a book this year. At least that’s what my new year’s resolutions said. And with new year’s resolutions, I realize I’ve forgotten to floss for the past four months and I need to sign up for a gym membership, cancel the one at that yoga studio I never went to. That reminds me I need to pay the bills, renew my vehicle registration, change the oil, schedule an appointment to have the summer tires put on. My friend is having a birthday party this weekend and I really shouldn’t miss it, because his birthday only comes once a year, and it’s the only time I see him.

Tossing and catching, tossing and catching, tossing. And catching.

I’m still juggling, but I can feel myself coming down, and I wish someone would catch me, toss me up again. I look for the voice that told me I was good at juggling, but the crowd is thinning, moving on with their day or running for cover because it’s raining. With each toss and each catch, the balls get slicker in the rain. My arms tire. I can’t do this forever, but I’m not sure how to stop.

“You don’t have to keep doing that,” someone says. I thought I was the only person left on the street, but the juggler has returned. They stand in front of me, an umbrella over their head, juggling supplies over their shoulder.

“I don’t know how to stop,” I say, because I don’t. Tossing and catching, tossing and catching, tossing and catching. But each toss feels dangerously close to a drop now. And I fear that if I drop the ball, I might lose everything else I’m juggling. And if I drop anything, I’m not sure I’ll be able to pick it up again.

“You just stop,” the juggler says. They don’t laugh at the ridiculousness of me, a juggler who’s never really juggled, not being able to stop.

I glance at their soft eyes, gentle and earnest, then I refocus. Tossing and catching, tossing and catching, tossing and catching. My heart races faster even than the moment the juggler tossed me the first ball. Why is stopping even more difficult than starting? Is it really that easy to just stop? Could I just stop and let them fall? Could I just stop going to church every Sunday, stop meeting friends for drinks every Thursday, stop making it to every birthday, stop coming to every family event, stop saying yes to everything, stop pushing myself to be more than I have the energy to be? Just STOP!

But I imagine the balls falling to the ground. Can I pick them up again? Or will they sit there in the puddle forever?

I glance at the juggler and notice my eyes are warm, despite the cool rain. The water streaming down my face tastes salty. “Can you help me?” I ask.

The juggler closes their umbrella and sets it down. They stare at me for a moment and then step between my arms, wrap their own arms around me. I don’t know their name, never had a conversation with them, but they are more comforting than a stranger’s hug should be.

The juggler steps back, picks the balls up from the ground. They toss them up, juggle a few times, then toss them across to me, and again I’m tossing and catching, tossing and catching, tossing and catching. The break has refreshed my arms and I feel like I could juggle for hours again, but I don’t. I stop, catch all three balls, and hand them back to the juggler.

They smile at me. “Why don’t you keep those.”

I sigh and think about the unplayed guitar in my living room, the PlayStation collecting dust, the lathe that hasn’t turned all year, the puzzle I started weeks ago but remains unfinished on the coffee table, the half knitted hat by my bedside, the easel with the beginnings of a portrait outlined, but still not painted in, the Rosetta Stone disc that never made it out of the package, the garden boxes full of weeds, my dead sourdough starter, the online shopping cart with plane tickets to Europe that I keep changing the departure date on, never hitting the checkout button. “No thank you,” I say. “I don’t have time for another hobby.” I pull my phone from my pocket, ignore the missed calls, voicemails, text messages, and check the time. The second half of my work day is gone, so it’s off to the grocery store I guess.