Towards The Light

"How come people suffer, how come people part?

How come people struggle, how come people break your heart?

Break your heart ...

We're gonna get it, get it together I know ...

Up and up and up"

 - Up and Up, by Coldplay

- This essay flits between funny and sad. It couldn't pick just one side. But I like to find the humor in the seriousness, for it feels like hope. 

I like balloons in theory, not so much in actual existence. They're pretty enough when bobbing around like dancers or boxers, one moment lithe and graceful and the next all clumsily tangled. Until they pop with the sound of an explosion and the hospital-like scent of latex, or disappear prematurely into the blue, leaving behind a distraught child whose grip wasn't quite committed enough. 

I once had a car full of balloons which I had to carry through a restaurant for a baby shower, and since that day (driving while feeling light-headed from the latex smell, faces turning towards me in the restaurant as though I were part of a parade) I've tried to avoid too much contact with them. Yet one day last November I found myself going to a party store and ordering six helium balloons: three blue, three green. It was about a six-block walk home uphill, and all the way the balloons seemed determined to escape or else strangle me in the attempt. Safely indoors, they hovered close to the ceiling; more plotting than festive, even a bit sinister, I felt. 

I bought them to commemorate a life. I bought them to let them go. 

It was the one-year anniversary of a death, a suicide, and my roommate and I felt it appropriate to mark the day. A year ago I had made that same trek uphill to my home after hearing the news. I had hardly known him, just his parents, yet I wept and wept. 

At the party store, the lady filled my balloons with helium, and as I looked around I saw a glow stick and had a sudden inspiration. 

"Do you have any more of these?" I asked. The lady shook her head, but I bought the lone lime green glow stick anyway. 

When my roommate arrived home, I explained my plan:

"I'm going to cut open the glow stick and drip the contents on the balloons so they'll glow as we release them!" 

If you're thinking this sounds like a bad idea, don't worry: it was, but I took the necessary precautions. 

I stood over the kitchen sink and wore rubber glovers while puncturing the thick plastic of the glow stick with a knife. My roommate noted that I looked like a mad scientist. How I wish I had a photo. The chemical interior dripped slowly into a styrofoam bowl I had set up. It was slow going, so I planned to use a Q-tip to dab the glowing substance onto the balloons. Until I realized that the chemical mixture was melting through the styrofoam. Plan abandoned. 

Out on the terrace, my roommate and I divided up the balloons and said a few words. The words were for the family, for it was in thinking of them, the parents and siblings, more than anything which lead us to mark the day. A year since the confusion, grief, and pain. A year of unanswered questions. One life can touch so many more than we usually realize. 

In the darkness, the green balloons especially were surprisingly visible. We released them and they shot upwards, up and up and onwards, smaller and smaller until they were out of sight, our eyes straining in the dark for one last pinprick of light. 

___________

Every year, the organization To Write Love On Her Arms commemorates National Suicide Prevention Week, September 10th - 16th. This year, their theme of the week is the word "Stay", and the fill-it-in statement "I was made for____". 

I was made for being part of a bigger story. 

I was made for remembering. 

I was made for striving to be kind and brave. 

I was made to hold the light. (and when I can't, to seek those who can hold the light for me).

Stay.

Please stay. 

What were you made for? Tell one person. Tell the world. 

Tell the world: even if you don't know exactly what you were made for in this world, let it simply ring out that you were made to be. Just to be, here and now, for a reason yet to come. Stay.