Today I kicked a balloon at Market Basket

At the end of my shopping trip at Market Basket I did my usual stare off into the distance to wait for forgotten items to float into my head when I saw a Happy Birthday balloon that had been disconnected from it’s home base and weighted by it’s clip slooped down to a random spot in the middle of the linoleum floor. Still floating on a hum of thoughtlessness my following action was accompanied by no more than the brief and subtle notion, “hey I’m about to do something without thinking about it too much, this is exciting”. I kicked the balloon. The force and direction were coincidentally what it took for it to float up 5 feet and flomp down at the exact spot it was made to exist. Sitting perfectly perched in the 6 inches between two flower pots on the third level of the flower display island it looked so pure and picture perfect and yet so recently kicked that I was overtaken by the most solid and calming “this is a moment” vibe. I sat in this moment, humming between the few prior seconds of balloon on ground and the few but ever increasing seconds of this new balloon state. I hummed in that moment until I remembered popcorn. As time continued to push me and my cart toward isle 16 I wondered how long I would remember that balloon kicking moment. Will it be lost forever, or live on the shelf of saved memories next to the time I kicked a basketball from half court backwards and it went in? Does it go on the kick shelf? The badass shelf? The indie moment shelf? Does it not get a shelf? If not, do I eventually live in a reality where to me, it never happened?

I often try to remember the indie film moments of life, if for no other reason, just to make sure my final deathbed life-flash of traumas and loves includes a moment to breathe on a kicked balloon and remember it’s all nothing, and all a constant traumatic love we decide when to feel.