Once upon a time, there was a little girl who was born with an empty heart. It happens rarely, but when it does it’s quite a tragedy. Think of the times you felt like nobody really liked you. That everybody was against you. Those were terrible moments, weren’t they? Well, that’s how the little girl felt every day, all day.
And so, every night when the entire city was asleep, she roamed the streets, looking through every trash can. See, when people yell at each other, call each other names or just stop talking altogether, they throw a bit of their love in the trash. The little girl had trained herself to hear the harsh words or angry silences from miles away, so she could easily find trash cans full of thrown away love on every hunt.
All the second-hand love she could find, she melted it into her big red balloon of forgotten care and kindness. The one comfort this poor little girl had was to look up at the balloon and see the journeys of the loves that had ended up in the trash. The long kisses, the held hands, the walks in the park and all the times the silence just said: ‘All is good’.
As you can imagine, looking at all those images made her steps light and her eyes shine as she looked up. No matter how ugly her paths, no matter how dark the skies, she had something to look at that warmed her tiny love starving heart.
Looking up to such gentle beauty is great when you want to feel warmth in a cold place, but not so much if you need to watch your step. And of course, since the girl’s eyes were always pointed at the love floating above her head, she forgot that there was also a ground beneath her feet. One day she tripped and as she was falling down, the balloon slid right through her tiny fingers.
She ran as fast as her little legs could carry her as the balloon started to float away from her. It flew over the benches where lovers held hands, the apartments where they curled up against each other, and the beaches where they made love. She ran through all the places she had longingly stared at for so many times, but she only noticed the balloon drifting further away from her. She climbed up the highest mountain but there was nothing she could do to grab it, no way to stop it from disappearing into a sky too high for her to reach.
And so she sat down on a rock. Tears ran down her cheeks as she watched it disappear into the horizon, when all of a sudden the balloon burst. A bright light in all the colors of the rainbow flashed through the sky, slowly fading to show the images of all the loves the balloon had ever contained. The girl didn’t watch this time. Her eyes were captured by all the people who came out of their houses. Thousands upon thousands of them looking up to the sky. The lovers who stopped talking, the lovers who shouted all the time and those who only sighed in each other’s presence. Mesmerized by the memory of what once was, they silently exchanged smiles, hugged or held each other’s hands.
The little girl’s tears slowly started to dry as she saw all this. For the first time in her life, she felt a love glowing from deep inside her.