Balloon

When I was fourteen, I found a half-deflated wedding balloon in a shopping centre parking lot. 

Fourteen is, like, the peak age for histrionics. I’d just read Perks of Being a Wallflower for the first time. I was wearing a thrifted trench coat I’d styled into a dress, for some reason, and bright red lipstick. Earlier that day, I’d bought my first pair of sepia-tinted, perfectly-rounded sunglasses, because I thought they made me look “vintage”, and rode around wearing them in the passenger seat of my mother’s car in the middle of winter with the window rolled down and my legs propped up on the dashboard. What does that even mean, fourteen-year-old me? What is vintage about a pair of Priceline sunglasses?

Anyway, I found this balloon sort of bobbing along the concrete parking lot. It was an underground parking lot: the kind I’m always scared now I’ll be abducted from, the kind my friend recently got mugged next to, the kind I never park my car in at night unless I’m with a very tall friend. (I don’t have many tall friends.) It was the kind of white that made you assume it had been whiter at some stage. Someone had stepped on it; somehow it had not popped, and had instead been decorated with a footprint. It was adorned with raised writing proclaiming it to be a wedding balloon, which is exactly how I knew it was: wedding, wedding, wedding, it said, like if you were at a wedding, and happened to just see a plain white balloon, you might think, oh, I wonder what that birthday balloon is doing here.

I kept it, and brought it back to my room, where I kept it until it deflated on its own. I didn’t want to pop it; it felt sacrilegious. When it had finally deflated into a perfectly flat, sad little shriveled version of itself, I taped it into the middle pages of my journal. At the time, I thought this might have meant something. One day, I thought, I’ll look back on this, and it will all be very poetic.

It isn’t. It’s still just a balloon.