The Red Balloon
Winter evening in Miami: The three of us got high on that Delta 10 thing. I liked it to my surprise; it was exactly what I like about Juuls and exactly not what I hate about dab pens — clean and cool, and somehow does not burn my throat out or metallically rewire my mind — and the high itself was subtle but consuming. I like being with them because I like the person that I am with them: slick but giddy, outgoing but unplaceable. I can also take up the space of two personalities, which is an afterthought but nonetheless I always feel it in the present. I was dressed well, wearing my Raf Simons which are humorously unexpected on me, but probably glamorous to people who don’t know me; fitted cotton red-orange pants, navy stringy top. The three of us humored the likelihood that a pair of identical twin guys next to a 6’2 girl must be a conspicuous sight.
In that evening’s extravagant Chinese restaurant: The three of us proceeded to occupy an arc of a large round table, the two of them seated on my left side. Two versus two. I was simultaneously two and one; simultaneously glaring and invisible. Ideal. Another pair of twins sat on my right side, their dual-ness almost as unorthodox as mine. They were five years apart, and yet conceived on the very same day. Frozen, the younger’s embryo was for five years, was revealed.
The arrangement was my fantasy: there I sat between the two sets of twins, and as an unattractive person can pass as more attractive when she stands between her two beautiful friends, and as a single sock amongst pairs of other will imply that it at one point knew its pair, in that position I had the great and fleeting fortune of embodying two people.
I am me, perched on the armrest of a red plush auditorium chair that is perfectly off-center from the stage, with my green corduroy hyperactive knees tapping together, holding a thermos of green tea. She is the actress I have hired to play my young self, and she is standing very still in the center of the stage. She is nervous like I would have been. I dressed her in some of my old old clothing: thick brown tights and knee high boots, and a maroon suede skirt and a ruffled white turtleneck, and a knitted brown sweater with acorn buttons whose sleeves are slightly too short.
I chose her because I could tell that she is off-balance, reaching for something, like I was, long before I had something to reach from yet still sensed that I must go elsewhere. I imagine her scaling up vines of rich green ivy that materialize on the stage, that drink the excess color out of the red velvet of the chairs, and that form a cradle of equilibrium for her to lie inside for infusing herself with all of the inspiration I wish to place before her. I don’t want to hug her. I want to train her young to acclimate to overwhelm, and to attach her to me with strands of orange peels and silk and daisy stems and cord, but never let them all go slack, for fear of something that I don’t wish to understand. I stand up and tell her that we are going to make something incredible together. She wants to believe me, and that is certainly enough at this stage.
“You can reach higher than other people can,” I tell her. “Look at how long your arms and legs are. You are not an object, like other people are. You are both more and less. You cannot be folded into a wooden box and cradled, cannot be carried into a circle of identical strangers who see you as a beautiful object. You have potential to reach what is too high to be given attention that is finalizing. It is a trade-off: you are not vulnerable enough to ever be secured. You will always be faintly alone, and when you cry you will fold into a fetal ball with your shins and forehead on the ground, safe and closed.
“People will start freezing you in your mid-stride — get ready. They will see your long limbs from a mile away, and they will make a bee line for you, approach you, and hand you a gray jumpsuit to wear. People like to name some things that they see by freezing them: things that would otherwise assemble themselves too complexly before their eyes. You will put on the jumpsuit mechanically because you’ll know that you feel no more safeguarded in any kind of attire that is not designated for you. For you right now, designation is as good as honor. But your capacity for trust will only dry from here on out, which in turn will strengthen your head and weaken your knees. Or it might weaken you head and strengthen your knees. I’m not sure about that one. In a decade, you will not feel any sense of security from the jumpsuit. Its fabric will feel as threatening as the innards of your friend’s heart on your own, which is why you will unzip and remove it for the first time since you put it on. I did this a number of years ago. But for now you must wear the suit, because I wore the suit and you are not here for me to gamble on your abilities that are at odds with your nature. Until you can remove the suit on your own, you will have to wear it tolerantly like a brooch.
“Foremost, this jumpsuit will facilitate your ability to float. I will tell you straight: you have been cursed to resonate to others as stills rather than reels. This means that your nature is more like the familiarity of a flamingo’s than the ambiguousness of an otter’s, and right now you cannot float without order, without a strict resonance with a quality, which in this present case is your height preserved in the jumpsuit as your identifier. You must think of the jumpsuit not as attire catered to the unremarkable, nor as a handout for one who is otherwise bereft, but as a kind of brace for someone whose remarkableness must be contained in a familiar structural definer for some time before becoming ambiguous enough that the jumpsuit is just clearly misfit. You must hibernate now in order to live later. In practice, this means that you will have to accept that you are desirable only as an enigma.
“The zipped suit will pry open all of your smooth sails and rubber slinkies that are meant to keep your juvenile gears oiled, and take to store all these morsels in its very own threads so that it, instead of you, is adaptable to the elements. You will become tender under its order, unfit to independently weather the sleets nor the light gusts, yet callused against your own turmoil. Further, in constant want of the resilience of your juvenility, it will reinforce the edges of your suspicious unease and your bewilderment, and your yearning for reaching out will fester quietly yet painfully. It will be difficult for you to identify what of this wild blue world you still possess that the interjecting suit has not claimed or occupied. Confusion will come naturally to you, and will further provide comfort. You will try to pride yourself in your circumstance of separation, and you will be strong, but you will also be exceptionally lonely.
“One day you will find material to make a new suit for yourself. You will fashion it well, and it will look good enough that people don’t ask where your old one went. They will either comment upon the change as an occurrence entirely of the present, or gracefully accept your new one. Both will be satisfying to you. But I warn you: as a crowd of vines grows in the direction that the gardener guides them, you will have grown at the direction of the gray suit which you will have worn for a decade, and the shock of mobility will be head wrenching and paralyzing.
“You must give to people’s eyes, and not only to their minds, a painting of your slight nature, in which you perch bending with the wind that spears straight through your hollow stomach. They will grasp the image, then subsequently feel like they are missing something necessary and yellow; so that your looming becomes a beautiful and ominous sight and the cavities that they perceive along your outline sit unreachable to them and packed with their very own desire.
“It is the illusion of vulnerability on top of any authentic vulnerability that will keep you mobile, even dancing. That space between staged and authentic vulnerability is the playground underneath the playground — the one with the controls over the stories. It is in that little region where you make the costumes and masks, and go on fasting streaks, and manipulate your overreactions into fake plans that actually replace real plans that you’re manically contriving to cover up the absurdity of your overreaction, or when exhaustion strikes is when you manipulate them into victimizations.
The Red Balloon would be a mere outline filled with air if it weren’t for its redness when it stretches spherical and thin. It would be a flimsy red scrap on the ground if it weren’t for its helium that floats higher than air. The thinner the red scrap stretches, the more helium it can hold so that it floats farther and approaches fulfilling the symbol of the Red Balloon, magnetic and independent and looming over everything else we can see plus more.
When the Red Balloon has been neglected on the ground it is plastic, whose redness is the only artifact of the Red Balloon. The red scrap will stay on the ground because even if it is untorn no one will pick it up to blow it up with helium. The scrap looks fat on top of the ground because it is sprawled out, and it is fat even if it is shriveled because it is excess. If I am filled enough so that I lift high enough for everyone to see me as singular and unmistakable just as they see the Red Balloon, I will be free from this world.
In my dreams I fly by swimming the breaststroke through the air. I take off from the sidewalk at about 45 degrees and push myself up and across the street so that when I reach the height of the buildings under which I first lifted, I am right across the street from them. The men down on the street all wear various textures of black, and they try to catch my ankles while I am rising but I move my limbs frantically so that I wiggle up quicker and those proper men all look like fools. One man jumps onto the horizontal bar that protrudes from a lamppost long after I have surpassed his reach and still he nearly loses his balance. Most of the men stand there puerile, watching me, and others mosey awkwardly until I am as unreachable and forcible as the Red Balloon. When I fly no one sees the colors of my eyes nor the way I sometimes touch my face when I speak in order to make it seem like my speaking is somewhat secondary.
