“I’m realizing one of my dreams, here, Sydney. Can you be a little less sarcastic?” “Oh, you’re right. I didn’t realize that one of your dreams is to die in a wicker basket. I must have forgotten when you told me that one.”
“It is about the balloon. I don’t want to be on it.” “It’s a control thing.” “You’re controlling me!” “You said it was about the balloon.” “The balloon is another in a long line of things you are controlling.”
I jumped inside with her. We waited another five minutes, silently, while the operator gave his mandatory safety lecture. Finally we ascended, noticing the world become smaller, shrinking away as we flew, weightless, leaving the earth behind. “It feels sort of like an elevator,” Sydney said. She was right, in a way. We couldn’t feel the flight so much as witness it. We were spectators to our own adventure. “It’s not so bad, is it?” I tried to convince her. I’m always trying to convince her. “I sort of like it, to be honest.” I had forced a smile out of her. It was the first time she’s smiled all day. It took my attention off my clogging eardrums. I had been doing those half-yawns to try to unplug them, but they were putting up resistance. My stomach began to rumble. I sat down. “Are you okay?” Sydney asked. Her eardrums and stomach and attitude were all fine. I was sort of jealous of her. “Yeah, I’m okay.” After a few minutes, I stood back up, got that dark starry vision that tends to plague me when I’m tired, and leaned against the side of the basket. It really was beautiful, this view. The clouds were fluffy and round, almost cartoonish. The type you drew in kindergarten, in those pictures where the sky didn’t extend to the horizon and the people wore triangle dresses and rectangle shirts. And they were as tall as trees. In a way, despite my motion sickness and general affinity towards things that could only be found on the ground, I never wanted to come down. I grabbed Sydney’s hand timidly, like we were on a first date, and stared at the tops of the trees. I tried to think of the perfect thing to say, but what I said ended up being more of an “I told you so” than anything else. I turned to her, making sure to frame my face in the horizon, and said, “What were you saying about my disregard for your comfort?” She just smiled in that “no amount of space between us and the earth is going to change our fading love” way and I realized the gamble I had made. And maybe it was worth it. Maybe the beauty and thrill of the game was worth the melancholy reality of the loss. But at that very moment, hundreds of feet above the earth, floating randomly without a discernable destination, I would just breathe and stare out at the sky, a brilliant robin’s egg blue, and try to forget the inevitable, dreadful descent back to the world. |