Le Ballon Rouge
Dec 11, 2021 3:56:07 GMT -6
Jason Anderson The Boss, Chunks of Darna Dare, and 2 more like this
Post by Roisin Cadieux on Dec 11, 2021 3:56:07 GMT -6
There was a balloon travelling down the street. I promise you it is not a metaphor. The balloon tapped the ground a couple times before being lifted up by the chilled winter breeze; aimlessly twisting and flipping in the air. Every time it touched down, whatever spectators were around tensed up just the slightest bit wondering if this will be the time. Hitting a piece of shard glass, a jagged edge in asphalt or any other such thing that the audience cares to imagine. POP! Anxiety...Though, admittedly, some may not be bothered by the possibility of the balloon popping. To them, the balloon inevitably pops or deflates. To soon be useless rubber without shape or motion.
...Again I promise the balloon is not a metaphor...It is just similar to so many other things that it is easy to make such comparisons. But truly, it is just a balloon and can’t fully cover the complexities and the vast tragedies of the human condition. To do so, would be to simplify and, in-turn, do injustice to being alive as a conceivably conscious creature who’s forced to be a convention, a tool, a gear in the biggest perpetual motion machine ever conceived.
A balloon cannot cover the dilemmas of an internal struggle or the suffering from external forces. To compare a person to a balloon is to say that they can only be two things. Alive or dead. Either carried by the wind or popped on a sudden collision with a piercing entity. Which, in a very nihilistic sense, seems fairly accurate. But it proceeds to fail to portray the pain of loss, the confusion of change, the consciousness of failure. As well, there is one thing that a balloon cannot be and that is remembered…Once a balloon is popped, it is mourned by a small child as the rest of us awkwardly watch them cry. We cannot begin to explain to him how insignificant it really is. But then even he moves on.
A balloon will never stick in our memories as a great contributor to our machine. A balloon is faceless and useless when the gas finally evacuates; nothing more can be taken from it. A human can create and his creations continually give from its own pure idea; to be bent, burnt, twisted, flipped, stretched, and torn anyway needed. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
The balloon versus the man who invented the balloon.
The balloon is gone but the creation of the balloon remains unaffected; the individuality is of no consequence. The blueprints are the most important aspects. A clone of the exact same quality can be made to replace it. Which brings another difference between the balloon and the human. A human is of infinitely more details. Making it impossible to recreate and replace one when they are lossed. Even if you had all the external details gathered from the biology left behind and the information collected by friends and family, you would still be missing the inside. The things never mentioned to or never understood by even those who knew them.
You could never recreate those thoughts. The thoughts that make cancer patients whisper ‘no more pain’ on their deathbeds. The thoughts that make regretful sinners stand out in the freezing rain and feel nothing but the turning in their stomach. The thoughts that give you that dark night feeling. Thus, when a human deflates, there is no comforting those in mourning. One cannot say there are plenty just like them and you can take your pick; like nothing ever happened. So, unlike the child, who eventually catches on to the pattern and rests assured that there will soon be more, we cannot so easily walk away.
Instead, we feel like we understand less and less as our lives empty out; evacuated of all the familiar faces. And are replaced by these untrusted, unknown other people that we’ll now have to bother meeting and assimilating to. Creating connections to once again inevitably lose to the wind, the glass, the rocks, and the rest of the microscopic details we could cross at any point. Or risk isolation and dying nameless in hollow homes. Again, I repeat once more, just so I may confirm that any attempt to do so is merely coincidental, that the balloon is not a metaphor. Roisin can walk away from a balloon...
As the balloon passed them by, it did not pop. And our hero did not continue to watch as others might have. Instead, they turned off the sidewalk, passing through black metal archways. A path laid before them in the form of damped, kicked up mulch. And on all sides were tombstones. Their gaze danced around, observing the different variations of death pageantries. Monuments of angels and cherubs. Obelisks of marble standing tall above others. Elaborate shrines where rich, white, suburbanite families spared no expense to honor their loved ones the best.
With a black, double breasted, wool coat wrapped tightly around them, Roisin continued down the line with a solemn expression - if not a sheepish reservation. Deep into the cemetery they pushed, looking from side to side; drumming up visions of tear-swept families. Or maybe a lonely lover paying a yearly visit. Maybe friends paying homage to the pack leader. But today, there was no one. On this cold December morning in Minnesota, it was just Roisin and the dead.
And there it was. A simple plaque on a stump of stone.
Roisin’s face twisted within seconds. There was an urge to look away but they held strong. Instead, they dug their hands out of their pockets and brought themselves to sit before the headstone. Arms resting on knees, there was a prolonged silence as they failed to produce words between the dread, anger, and woeful grief. Several times opening their mouth only to find awkward sounds born of repressed wailing.
Roisin closed their eyes and took a deep breath. Letting out a long trail of steam through their nostrils, they brought themselves to once again look upon the marker of their dead father. The memories did not come flooding back. Instead, what hadn’t fully faded came back in small drops, which was admittedly worse.
“I won’t ask if you’re proud of me.” Out came a broken voice. “You loved wrestling but you wanted me to grow up and be something sensible, right? Maybe work in an office like you? Maybe start a family? You wanted me to be happy, right?” They stopped to take a forced breath, battling the white-rapids inside them.
“You couldn’t have known your child while they were still so young. You probably thought I would always be Alex, be your little boy. You had no idea who I’d be but you know what you wanted me to be. You wanted me to be loved and that’s an unfair expectation to put on me. Unfair to want that of me and just disappear from my life like you never existed.”
Watery eyes met with cold hands as Roisin sniffled through a running nose. Had to be the weather, right? “At this point, I think my life has been more without you than with. But, it sure as shit doesn’t feel like that. Because when you died, that pain…It stuck around for a long time. That pain raised me the rest of the years you weren’t there. Made me a lot of things but happy isn’t one of them. And loved isn’t the other. Sure as shit made me confused though.” Their cheeks turned a blotchy read as tears could no longer be stopped.
“But, when you grow up like that, it all feels normal. You don’t think much of it. The anger and the distrust is what everyone feels, right? That torrent of struggles as no one is there to give you the answer, that is just everyday shit, right? Seeing family members lose sight of their bond as they are besieged by turmoil. That was my normal. My life stopped. For a long time everything my existence was, froze. I struggled in highschool. Didn’t feel like it mattered. But somehow I graduated just to drop out of college almost right after. Moved out of state and then proceeded to freak out for a few more years…” A brief intermission as more recent memories did finally flood in.
“I found someone, ya know…A guy named Sam. He was amazing. He was nice and patient and seemed to really care when I said anything, even the dumbest of shit. It felt so nice to be heard and have all that insecurity of being a nuisance washed away. Now he doesn’t want anything to do with me. That one is on me, admittedly. But, I can’t help but feel like it was because of what I have learned to be true. Happiness preludes tragedy. You taught me that…Well, more so the pain taught me that. I was so afraid of even the slightest bit of that pain returning again that I did what I always do. I fell to pieces, lost my sense of self, and cursed the world around me. Turns out people tend to be pushed away when that happens…who knew?!” A sick, poisoned chuckle came from our hero’s lips.
“I’m not angry at you…I mean, I am angry. But, you didn’t choose to get a brain tumor. Your god gave that to you. But, you didn’t have to live with that fact. I did. And more and more everyday I am figuring out it isn’t normal. Everyday I am figuring out how fucked it is.” Once again their face twisted up. But this time there was no preventing it. They caught their face in their hands and sobbed with violent convulsions in their spine. “But, I don’t know how to stop it…It feels like all I have are problems. Like I am being swallowed up and there is barely a me. Just this stupid sense of consciousness and a bunch of endless problems. And the only thing I am good at is punching and kicking and getting hurt.”
“And the thing is. If you saw me right now and seen everything I’ve been through and done, you’d still cheer me on. Even if you didn’t want me to be a wrestler, you’d be in the crowd cheering for me…” They looked up to the sky as their jaw shuddered. A deep swallow to get through the words. “But you’re not here to do that. So, I have to go out next friday and step into a cage with no one in my corner except myself. And I will ask myself, how the fuck did I get here. No one will know that it isn’t in amazement but in horror. That I didn’t climb up to this point. I was running away. Because I don’t know how to be happy and loved. You died before you could teach me that.”
And as Roisin continued to sit there in the cold, talking to the air - for they did not believe their dad was there to hear them - I must remind you one last time: In case over this short period you might have forgotten, the balloon is not a metaphor. The balloon does not change the world when it pops. It does not invoke grief when it is popped. There are no children of the balloon left lost in the world. Balloons are just things of temporary joy which we do not give much thought to, whether here or not. There are no headstones for balloons.
...Again I promise the balloon is not a metaphor...It is just similar to so many other things that it is easy to make such comparisons. But truly, it is just a balloon and can’t fully cover the complexities and the vast tragedies of the human condition. To do so, would be to simplify and, in-turn, do injustice to being alive as a conceivably conscious creature who’s forced to be a convention, a tool, a gear in the biggest perpetual motion machine ever conceived.
A balloon cannot cover the dilemmas of an internal struggle or the suffering from external forces. To compare a person to a balloon is to say that they can only be two things. Alive or dead. Either carried by the wind or popped on a sudden collision with a piercing entity. Which, in a very nihilistic sense, seems fairly accurate. But it proceeds to fail to portray the pain of loss, the confusion of change, the consciousness of failure. As well, there is one thing that a balloon cannot be and that is remembered…Once a balloon is popped, it is mourned by a small child as the rest of us awkwardly watch them cry. We cannot begin to explain to him how insignificant it really is. But then even he moves on.
A balloon will never stick in our memories as a great contributor to our machine. A balloon is faceless and useless when the gas finally evacuates; nothing more can be taken from it. A human can create and his creations continually give from its own pure idea; to be bent, burnt, twisted, flipped, stretched, and torn anyway needed. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
The balloon versus the man who invented the balloon.
The balloon is gone but the creation of the balloon remains unaffected; the individuality is of no consequence. The blueprints are the most important aspects. A clone of the exact same quality can be made to replace it. Which brings another difference between the balloon and the human. A human is of infinitely more details. Making it impossible to recreate and replace one when they are lossed. Even if you had all the external details gathered from the biology left behind and the information collected by friends and family, you would still be missing the inside. The things never mentioned to or never understood by even those who knew them.
You could never recreate those thoughts. The thoughts that make cancer patients whisper ‘no more pain’ on their deathbeds. The thoughts that make regretful sinners stand out in the freezing rain and feel nothing but the turning in their stomach. The thoughts that give you that dark night feeling. Thus, when a human deflates, there is no comforting those in mourning. One cannot say there are plenty just like them and you can take your pick; like nothing ever happened. So, unlike the child, who eventually catches on to the pattern and rests assured that there will soon be more, we cannot so easily walk away.
Instead, we feel like we understand less and less as our lives empty out; evacuated of all the familiar faces. And are replaced by these untrusted, unknown other people that we’ll now have to bother meeting and assimilating to. Creating connections to once again inevitably lose to the wind, the glass, the rocks, and the rest of the microscopic details we could cross at any point. Or risk isolation and dying nameless in hollow homes. Again, I repeat once more, just so I may confirm that any attempt to do so is merely coincidental, that the balloon is not a metaphor. Roisin can walk away from a balloon...
As the balloon passed them by, it did not pop. And our hero did not continue to watch as others might have. Instead, they turned off the sidewalk, passing through black metal archways. A path laid before them in the form of damped, kicked up mulch. And on all sides were tombstones. Their gaze danced around, observing the different variations of death pageantries. Monuments of angels and cherubs. Obelisks of marble standing tall above others. Elaborate shrines where rich, white, suburbanite families spared no expense to honor their loved ones the best.
With a black, double breasted, wool coat wrapped tightly around them, Roisin continued down the line with a solemn expression - if not a sheepish reservation. Deep into the cemetery they pushed, looking from side to side; drumming up visions of tear-swept families. Or maybe a lonely lover paying a yearly visit. Maybe friends paying homage to the pack leader. But today, there was no one. On this cold December morning in Minnesota, it was just Roisin and the dead.
And there it was. A simple plaque on a stump of stone.
Eion Drugan
1965 - 2007
“To meet again, we can only pray…”
Roisin’s face twisted within seconds. There was an urge to look away but they held strong. Instead, they dug their hands out of their pockets and brought themselves to sit before the headstone. Arms resting on knees, there was a prolonged silence as they failed to produce words between the dread, anger, and woeful grief. Several times opening their mouth only to find awkward sounds born of repressed wailing.
Roisin closed their eyes and took a deep breath. Letting out a long trail of steam through their nostrils, they brought themselves to once again look upon the marker of their dead father. The memories did not come flooding back. Instead, what hadn’t fully faded came back in small drops, which was admittedly worse.
“I won’t ask if you’re proud of me.” Out came a broken voice. “You loved wrestling but you wanted me to grow up and be something sensible, right? Maybe work in an office like you? Maybe start a family? You wanted me to be happy, right?” They stopped to take a forced breath, battling the white-rapids inside them.
“You couldn’t have known your child while they were still so young. You probably thought I would always be Alex, be your little boy. You had no idea who I’d be but you know what you wanted me to be. You wanted me to be loved and that’s an unfair expectation to put on me. Unfair to want that of me and just disappear from my life like you never existed.”
Watery eyes met with cold hands as Roisin sniffled through a running nose. Had to be the weather, right? “At this point, I think my life has been more without you than with. But, it sure as shit doesn’t feel like that. Because when you died, that pain…It stuck around for a long time. That pain raised me the rest of the years you weren’t there. Made me a lot of things but happy isn’t one of them. And loved isn’t the other. Sure as shit made me confused though.” Their cheeks turned a blotchy read as tears could no longer be stopped.
“But, when you grow up like that, it all feels normal. You don’t think much of it. The anger and the distrust is what everyone feels, right? That torrent of struggles as no one is there to give you the answer, that is just everyday shit, right? Seeing family members lose sight of their bond as they are besieged by turmoil. That was my normal. My life stopped. For a long time everything my existence was, froze. I struggled in highschool. Didn’t feel like it mattered. But somehow I graduated just to drop out of college almost right after. Moved out of state and then proceeded to freak out for a few more years…” A brief intermission as more recent memories did finally flood in.
“I found someone, ya know…A guy named Sam. He was amazing. He was nice and patient and seemed to really care when I said anything, even the dumbest of shit. It felt so nice to be heard and have all that insecurity of being a nuisance washed away. Now he doesn’t want anything to do with me. That one is on me, admittedly. But, I can’t help but feel like it was because of what I have learned to be true. Happiness preludes tragedy. You taught me that…Well, more so the pain taught me that. I was so afraid of even the slightest bit of that pain returning again that I did what I always do. I fell to pieces, lost my sense of self, and cursed the world around me. Turns out people tend to be pushed away when that happens…who knew?!” A sick, poisoned chuckle came from our hero’s lips.
“I’m not angry at you…I mean, I am angry. But, you didn’t choose to get a brain tumor. Your god gave that to you. But, you didn’t have to live with that fact. I did. And more and more everyday I am figuring out it isn’t normal. Everyday I am figuring out how fucked it is.” Once again their face twisted up. But this time there was no preventing it. They caught their face in their hands and sobbed with violent convulsions in their spine. “But, I don’t know how to stop it…It feels like all I have are problems. Like I am being swallowed up and there is barely a me. Just this stupid sense of consciousness and a bunch of endless problems. And the only thing I am good at is punching and kicking and getting hurt.”
“And the thing is. If you saw me right now and seen everything I’ve been through and done, you’d still cheer me on. Even if you didn’t want me to be a wrestler, you’d be in the crowd cheering for me…” They looked up to the sky as their jaw shuddered. A deep swallow to get through the words. “But you’re not here to do that. So, I have to go out next friday and step into a cage with no one in my corner except myself. And I will ask myself, how the fuck did I get here. No one will know that it isn’t in amazement but in horror. That I didn’t climb up to this point. I was running away. Because I don’t know how to be happy and loved. You died before you could teach me that.”
And as Roisin continued to sit there in the cold, talking to the air - for they did not believe their dad was there to hear them - I must remind you one last time: In case over this short period you might have forgotten, the balloon is not a metaphor. The balloon does not change the world when it pops. It does not invoke grief when it is popped. There are no children of the balloon left lost in the world. Balloons are just things of temporary joy which we do not give much thought to, whether here or not. There are no headstones for balloons.