Helium Balloons

Where Did It All Go? Part 1

Dear Friend,

You want to know what would be really hilarious and funnily ironic.

If the girl who spent her whole life dreaming about fairytales never got her happy ending. She indulged in her fair share of wishful thinking, all down the drain. Charms and magic and enchantments will never be looked at in the same way.

Her bucket list… long and unending never fulfilled. Not even close. She wanted to fall in love, witness a miracle and travel the world. I don’t know where it started, but somewhere along the way, everything took a very wrong and abrupt turn. Growing up, she watched the tale of her mother’s demise unraveling before her eyes and she wanted anything but the same life she had witnessed. She wanted anything but the passivity, where even thinking is looked at as a crime.

A monotone of chores and errands and children and that’s how it all was. When novel ideas were just as blasphemous as actually wanting something for yourself. Quirks and eccentricities will never be as valuable as fake nails, fake hair and conversations so superficial that she stopped imagining anything below the surface, so blissfully shrouded in happiness like life actually meant anything anymore.

On some winter nights, she’d see effervescent images of guitars and poetry and romantic comedies but she’d push them away because that’s what she’s been conditioned to do. That smile on her foundation-coated face never touched her eyes like they used to. Those novels she started, exhilarated, euphorically scrawling down ideas as if, like sky-writing, they’d disappear into the atmosphere and cease to exist, like cotton candy melts away, its sweetness extinguishing itself like embers on a hard floor.

She never wrote anything but grocery lists and to-do lists that she taped on the front-side of refrigerator in that same handwriting she used for those numerous journals and diaries and post-its. That creative girl who always said “If your dreams don’t scare you then they’re not big enough” is trapped somewhere, her screams amplified but solidified into stone cold silence. Poor girl, though, she’ll never make an appearance again.

At high school re-unions, everybody will tell her how much she’s changed but she’d just laugh it off and say “I grew up, is all” ignoring that poor girl who is still yelling and wondering where life went all wrong.

Yours Lovingly Xx