sarro’s balloon rides at radio dawn.
Sean Hurley as Sherwin Sleeves.
I am on a hot air balloon with Sherwin Sleeves. It is early Sunday morning, before dawn, half awake, half asleep, the perfect state for listening. On the radio, Sean Hurley’s radio program, Atoms, Motion, and the Void, featured on WBEZ’s Re:sound.
It was the middle of the night in New Hampshire and he couldn’t sleep. He walked out in a field, outside his house. There he sees something in the sky. A hot air balloon lands. He grabs hold. He lifts himself into the basket. There, he meets a drunken pilot, simply drifting.
As the story unfolds, the journey became a kind of allegorical enactment of the necessary voyage that grief and mourning require, a drift across the unknown on which one bobs like a balloon on the breeze until one perhaps, out of nowhere, lands on the ground again.
“Sarro’s Balloon” by Kevie Metal.
Loss doesn’t vanish as it is something already absent, but memory alters what is gone. When one hits the surface of the earth again, murky thoughts from the middle of the night get reintegrated into broad daylight. If we’re lucky, we rediscover notes from before a tragedy, saturate them in tears, and go on. There is no better medium in which to experience this voyage than through sound: in a balloon on the air where the dreamlike and the actual merge for a moment in the secret whispers just before the dawns of Sunday mornings.