Only a Child: Bursting the Bubble

By Brocken Inaglory (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0 
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I was seven the day I tasted my first bubble.

I was the sole occupant of the street in front of my house, a 50-yard stretch of asphalt dead-ending at a little copse of trees. I stood, purple bubble bottle and yellow wand in hand, absorbing the glaring summer sunlight that had sent everyone else indoors but that I seemed to photosynthesize into smiles and pumping arms.

I repeatedly pulled the wand from the bottle, dripping refracted light, a sheet like a prism's blink stretched across it eye.

Sometimes I would purse my lips and blow the bubbles myself, but more often I would let the air do it for me, arm outstretched, whirling and watching bubbles stream from the wand, bursting into existence in sparks and glints of color as the wind gave them life.

I stood and watched, the blood rushing in my ears and the world swirling around me. Magical! Floating spheres of light and reflections. The elixir of life, holding precious a tiny breath of air.

I had the sudden urge to taste the bubble. I ran down the street craning my neck, stretching my tongue to reach it, but the wind tasted it before I did, blowing it out of my reach and eating it up.

So I tried again. And again. I ran up the street, down the sidewalk, across neighbors’ yards, into bushes, everywhere the bubbles went, trying to catch one with my lips.

And all the time I had the little jar of bubble solution clenched in one cautious hand. It never crossed my mind to taste from the source, from the bottle or the wand; those weren’t magical. There’s nothing ethereally enticing about a sticky, purple plastic bottle or a yellow, dripping wand. The magic was in the air around me, in the bubbles caught in the current of the wind.

The magic was there right up until a bubble danced to my lips and burst on my tongue. In the split-second between contact and taste I was shocked at having achieved my quest.

The shock was short-lived, however, as the filmy, acrid feel of the bubble filled my mouth. It didn’t taste like I thought magic ought to. I wiped my tongue on my shirt, spat into the grass, glared at the purple bottle in my fist, ran inside to repeatedly flush my mouth out with water.

I felt foolish for the first time, like a child. Only a child would run around for long hours in the burning sun, chasing impossible, disgusting bubbles. Only a child wouldn’t realize that the bubbles in the air were no different than the bubbles-to-be in the bottle. Only a child.