I See Bubbles
I see bubbles. I don’t know if you see bubbles. I’m guessing you don’t. When I was a kid I had no idea that the bubbles were anything special, and when I was in the second grade I mentioned them to Justin Daily and he didn’t know what I was talking about and we got into a fight over it and I had to do detention for three days. Which was weird, because that was the only time I ever did detention in elementary school, and they didn’t have like a regular detention room or system set up, I don’t think, because I did my detention sitting in the principal’s office in the corner.
I read “Henry Reed, Inc.,” and “Henry Reed’s Big Show” while doing my detention. It didn’t seem like a big deal. This wasn’t on Saturday or afterschool or anything, it was during lunch/recess.
In fact the more I think about it, the more I’m kind of weirded out, because surely in an elementary school of… six grades, two classes to a grade, maybe twenty kids in a class, that’s two hundred and forty kids, plus kindergarteners. With that many kids, some of them must have been getting in trouble every day, and therefore they must have had some kind of time-out room or detention lunch room or something. I’m sure they did. But I sat in the principal’s office. I didn’t have to do anything except sit quietly, which was fine with me; I just read.
But that was the first time the bubbles got me in trouble. Maybe it was me talking about the bubbles that made them separate me from the other kids. I’m sure I’m making it out to be weirder than it was. Your perceptions are always skewed when you think back to childhood like that. So I didn’t mention the bubbles after that, because I didn’t want to get in trouble again. I think.
For a while — high school, most of junior high — the bubbles went away. Or, I didn’t see them. I don’t remember waking up one morning and noticing they were gone. When I was in the seventh grade, early one morning in March or April, I was going out to the car and I tripped and fell and my knee hit a brick and it hurt like hell, but no one was around and I was feeling all tough so I didn’t mention it to anyone, and ever since then (even today, I mean like, five minutes ago) whenever I go up stairs I can hear a little clicking sound coming from that knee. When that happened, I didn’t see any bubbles. I call out that particular memory on account of it’s so vivid.
Freshman week, in college, I saw the bubbles again. I was standing by the buses for the orientation trip (there was an orientation trip) and just staring off into space and then I noticed them, all around. Since then they’ve been around pretty much all of the time, except in airports and on planes. I’ve never seen one in an airport.
Sometimes there’s a lot of them around, and when I walk through the room they wriggle out of my way. I’ve never touched one, they move too fast. Usually there’s just one or two in my line of vision, more if I’m looking out a long ways. They stick pretty close to the ground, only about eight feet, although they seem to do fine getting higher in buildings. The lobby of the university library is always full of them, and they woosh around all spastic, keeping out of people’s ways.
I don’t think they’re really alive, any more than regular soap bubbles are alive, or dead leaves or plastic bags in the wind. But I’m not taking any bets on it.