Forlorn Balloon

This is the only drawing, so far, that I have ever done in a bathroom stall, unless you include graffiti, which I may have done in my best-forgotten high school days. It was made during my recent trip to the Tysons Corner Mall. There was a wastebasket in the stall, which was the larger kind of chamber usually reserved for disabled people or mothers with children. Someone had placed the balloon in the wastebasket, or rather its string anchor, as it still had enough buoyancy to float. Moved by its poignancy, I wanted to take its picture but I had no camera, not cell phone nor iPad 2. So I pulled out my iPad 1 and drew this quick sketch, hoping that someone would not try to claim the toilet stall.

I felt the pathos of this little scene, the cheerful yellow balloon thrown into the trash in this perpetually dim, airless, grubby environment. It spends its last hours here, bravely rising above the refuse, cast off by heedless people. It seemed humanoid to me, the balloon head on its string neck, above the elegantly draped wastebasket body. I always feel a special sadness when I see things like toys or wrapping paper or other cheerful stuff rejected or trod into trash or debris. So now the little balloon, or at least its image, will be remembered, at least for a while.