Inflatable - Matti Ben-Lev
We stole an orange, inflated, rubber balloon from a car dealership and put it in my silver, 2004 Toyota Matrix, the same night you confessed you wanted to die. We sat in my car, at the entrance of a state park, at two a.m., and you spun a horror story that I almost believed and you spoke so softly, a hushed rasp in your voice, that I could feel your words vibrating across each individual vertebrae as we gazed out at the dirty gates, the park’s gaping mouth. You whispered and then you shrieked and my heart skittered to the backseat and a part of me left my body and a part of me knew that I wanted to die too and a part of me understood, with the certainty of fabric, that the two of us didn’t belong together, but the pull was irresistible, like stretching rubber. Inflatable.
We returned to our apartment and carried the balloon and the tall black pole that cradled it. Only later, we discovered that the pole was sprinkled with fiberglass. We soaked gummy bears in green apple Smirnoff and sat on my bed watching horror movies until our eyes fluttered with scraps of sleep, with bits of tangerine gelatin stuck between our teeth.
I spent weeks digging the painful glass crystals out of my fingers with a pair of tweezers. For the next four years, we would watch each other go in and out of hospitals, killing ourselves slowly, until one of us got better. I return to that night in my car, as if remembering could blunt my guilt for getting better, could bring back the intimacy at the pit of captured air and orange rubber, could resurrect the moment before we popped the balloon, dragged it to the curb.
Originally published by Anti-Heroin Chic, March 2024
Matti's work has been published (or is forthcoming) in The Rumpus, Libre, Grub Street, Ekphrastic Review, Corporeal Lit Mag, and elsewhere. Matti holds a BA from Towson University where he studied creative writing and served as a poetry editor for Grub Street, Towson’s literary magazine. He is currently an MFA candidate in nonfiction at George Mason University and a reader for the lit mags Phoebe and So to Speak. You can find him at Mattibenlev@gmail.com or on Twitter @MattiBL6.
