I heard the first balloon pop. It was yellow, hardly blown up, and the loss of it didn’t really affect anybody. My younger baby sister started crying, but that’s all the trouble the balloon really caused. The party went on, and the popped balloon was kicked under the refrigerator and forgotten about.
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I’ve never liked balloons. From the sound they make when being twisted to the explosion of noise they make when the exhale in one large breath, I’ve hated balloons for all my life. I hate filling the balloons with air, and I especially despise having to pop them. Not only do I have to hold the needle, I also have to give death.

Even when I kill something I don’t like, I still feel guilty. I have to listen to the balloon’s last cry as its lungs lose its precious life giving air. So, naturally, when I discovered the very balloon I’d accidentally popped three years ago, that guilt washed over me once again.

It might seem to like I’m insane, but imagine the feeling of discovering a dead body that you had buried three years earlier and then forgotten about. All the hated feelings wash back, and that’s exactly what happened with the balloon.

All my guilt drowned me, and I felt like I deserved to die since I’d taken the life of another. The more I talk, the more stupid I sound. Who cares about popping a balloon? Yet even as I know my feelings to be insane, I still cannot seem to wash them out of my body. I’ve lost control of myself. How weird does that sound? I can see how a person loses themselves with drugs or alcohol of something, but I don’t understand how I’ve lost control of my feelings simply by seeing a balloon.

And a yellow balloon, at that. It’s not just a balloon, it’s a yellow balloon. It has characteristics, a personality, and now all it has is skin without muscle. It’s sickening, what I did to it. I try blowing the balloon back up, but it has a gigantic hole in it and resists coming back to life. I try taping the fissure, but there’s always a leak I can’t seem to find. I try for hours to find some way I can heal the balloon I injured, all to no avail.

And at the end of the day, I still feel guilt. There are millions, probably billions, of balloons that are now in the trash, yet I still feel guilty for the life that I took.

As I read back over this, I can’t even begin to explain how these stupid thoughts are drilled into my mind, even though my mind also knows, at the same time, how preposterous those thoughts really are. I feel like a kid who looks in his closet for a monster, sees nothing, and yet goes back to look again because he’s convinced that his suspicions about the monster are true.

I’m convinced that I just took a life, yet all my schooling told me that balloons aren’t living. All my life I’ve been taught that rubber is just rubber, latex just latex, yet I feel as if there is more than what I’ve been taught.

I’m going insane, and there’s nothing I can do to stop myself.