Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia

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Into the version of the sky above my house one afternoon when I was twelve, the nearby high school released a flood of pink balloons. Maybe fifty head-sized shapes allowed to rise and flee inside the light inside the day, until they landed popped by heat or puncture, or, in time, lost their buoyancy with age. Each balloon had a message tucked in its insides, I’d heard — handwritten dispatch penned in private by whoever blew it up. Some touched down on local lawns and in the streets around the school, though most continued further — their latex bodies trailing out into the outlying air, becoming anybody’s, gone.

One particular balloon, I later noticed, having found no others I could claim, became caught in the high branches of a pine over my family’s neighbors’ yard — too far to climb to or to lob a stick at. No one else seemed to have noticed. I knew at once I needed this as mine — that I had to read the words cribbed inside it—they were for me—words no one else would ever see.

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