Excuse Me Sir, Is This Your Life Story?
By: Liam Brodentel
Tags: Travel, Short Fiction, Life, Fiction, Short Story

Maybe True, Mostly Metaphor pt I: Wonder

Photo by Karim MANJRA on Unsplash

Close your eyes and imagine your younger self.

How young? That age where you believed anything was possible. When you wanted to be an astronaut-veterinarian-singer moonlighting as mad scientist when you grew up (and don’t you pretend like you never believed something like that).

Ok, you there yet? Good. Now, open your eyes again because I need you to keep reading the rest of this little story.

Little you is sitting on a park bench on a warm spring day. Other kids are at the playground, playing tag, crawling on the jungle gym, challenging each other on the monkey bars. Or, if you’re at the park that I’m currently at as I write this, the kids are not doing any of those things and are instead sitting around looking intently at their phones. Either way, doesn’t matter. It’s a warm spring day and you’re on your big green park bench. You’re probably holding an ice cream cone in one hand. In the other hand, you are most definitely holding the string to a bright, red balloon.

Like I said, it’s a warm spring day. The birds are chirping. The adults are off either feeding the ducks or rounding up their kids at the playground. One eccentric woman nearby is rollerblading for some reason. You’re happy as a clam.

That is, until a bee zigs and zags by you, giving your little heart a start for the briefest of moments. In that single, short, instant of distraction, when all your attention is turned, you let go of your beautiful, red balloon.

You emit a little gasp as you realize what just happened. Wide-eyed, you stare up wordlessly at your lost possession, as it bobs away quicker than you ever would have thought. It looks so out of place up there, like it doesn’t belong that high — even though you now realize that the balloon has been trying to get away and up into that sky from the first moment you got it. Now, its desire has been achieved, untethered and jail-broken, bouncing around in the air. Ever getting smaller.

It moves so quickly. One moment, it’s a bright red tomato against a blue egg shell tablecloth. The next, a juicy apple. You blink and now it’s a cherry on top of a sundae as it drifts by an ice cream cloud. Finally, it’s just a speck — a microscopic blemish in the middle of a vast, endless sky — and you’re squinting so hard you can’t tell if it’s superman or an airplane or your once beloved balloon.

Now, you ask yourself the same questions every kid asks when this inevitably happens:

Where will it go now?

How far will it drift?

Will a bird pop it? Or an airplane?

Will it go to outer space?

What happened to the ice cream that was I was holding in my other hand?

Fast forward a few years, now. You still remember that day at the park. You’re still young enough to wonder where the balloon could have gone. Maybe another country. Probably Nepal. The world is a big, big place and there’s lots of countries that balloon could be.

Maybe a young man in Barcelona saw it drift — just out of reach — past some angry bulls running through the streets.

Or perhaps it was spotted in the far background of a photo taken in Paris, behind two lovers kissing in front of the Eiffel Tower.

Possibly, in Tibet, another small child much like yourself glimpsed it and, seeing the balloon looking ragged from all its traveling, she managed to pluck it out of the air and draw a little smile on it. Then maybe she gave it to a nearby monk to put a similar smile on his own older, somber face.

It probably got eaten by a crocodile when it made it to Australia, but let’s hope not.

Are you still with me, reader? I never promised this would be a short story, or even a realistic one. But, I will promise that it will be fun, if you let it. Let your mind blur the lines between what is and what could be. After all, that’s what story-telling is all about. Open-mindedness is my favorite trait in readers like you. You’re willing to read on? Great, I like you already. You can’t tell from where you’re sitting, but I just high-fived you.

Back to our story. It’s weird, but let’s say you continually think about this balloon as you go about your life. It’s not the only thing you think about, of course, but it’s in the back of your mind somewhere, occasionally making appearances. The older you become, the more things get in the way of your balloon thoughts.

You go to school.

You learn to drive.

You go on dates.

You learn that talking about your missing balloon is not the best way to break the ice with someone cute on said dates.

By the time you go to college, you’re still wondering what the balloon is up to. You finish school and you’re faced with that great existential question that you probably should have answered before you spent fifty-thousand dollars on a degree.

What now?

What do I do for work?

What kind of life do I want?

What did I want to be when I grew up?

Where’d my dang balloon go?