The Worst Thing Man Has Ever Done

Thank you for your kind and beautiful letter. But don’t write to me about balloons, my friend! Oh, my haunting memories! Hardly a week goes by when I don’t think about this...

It was a warm summers evening in Ostend, Belgium (no, rest ye, this will not be a parody on Dr. Evil's life story)... an evening in Ostend where I had come to for my holiday in July 2010. To see the coast and the place where the old glorious voodoo puppeteer James Ensor had lived & worked all his life. It was a beautiful sultry pre-night and after a hard day of seeing and thinking, I had rested my body down on a delightfully busy but peaceful beach. The sun had just sank in the North Sea, leaving the sky pink and purple, and all over the beach, people were lazy, drunk and jolly. The fin-de-siècle atmosphere was thick that night, overlooked by the magnificent old seaside theatre and hotels.

I lay reclined on the sand to make some drawings or do some writing and close to me a young family had lain down too. A fine specimen of a bearded hippie father, his young, smiling woman in a flowery summer dress and a little girl of four or five playing with a big balloon. All was peace that evening. The girl was playing with her balloon, giggling and crowing with timeless pleasure. She was playing with a balloon...

At one point, a friendly gust of wind blew the balloon out of her hands, bouncing it over the warm sand in my direction. The girl made some excited leaps while she danced over. I wanted to tap the balloon back to her. I had forgotten the sharp pencil in my hand. I had forgotten... There was a small poof, not even a bang, and then a little girl stood right in front of me, her angelic laugh slowly melting from her face as she sensed something extraordinary and mysterious had happened. She wasn't quite sure what exactly. Had I performed some magic trick? Was this a game? 'Guess where the balloon is now'? It must be, mustn't it? The world could not be as wicked & cruel as to killing her balloon. So I, the curly man, must have done something strange that would prove to be incredibly funny the next minute. Where did I hide it? She must have thought something like that. But then she saw the pink rubbery remains on the sand and the awful truth sank in: balloons can go poof… unsalvageable… gone! She didn't begin to cry, no trembling lips. She just accepted that the fun was over and returned to her parents without her balloon.

I was heartbroken. I had stopped her fun. I was responsible. There & then... I was there the night that fun ended... And I had ended it. The parents were laughing at the situation, accepted my stuttered apologies like kings & queens, and could see how sorry and shocked I was. But all this mattered not one bit to my guilt.

This is the most terrible thing I have done in all my life. Worse than all other heinous acts of my life of crime combined.