Emotion

Sometimes happiness feels like a bubble. You blow the bubble up with your breath and your mouth and your lungs but it's really all in the soap. The stupid soap that you have nothing to do with. The soap that is manufactured out of who knows what and dolloped into plastic bottles with synthetic colors and labels of happy children having no trouble blowing bubbles with their breath and their mouth and their lungs because that is what controls their bubbles and not the soap. But this is life and not a picture on a label so you blow your bubbles without control. Sure, you blow too hard and it goes away. But then again you blow just right and it goes away too, so really, who is at fault here? That's a rhetorical question, don't answer that. So you blow and you blow and maybe on the first time or maybe on the fourteenth you're able to come up with this bubble that looks pretty amazing and beautiful and nobody could ever beat this bubble of yours because a) it's yours and b) you blew it with your breath and mouth and lungs and that is what makes you you and the soap has nothing to do with it because in that split second of beauty and hope, the split second where that bubble exists, in that split second you are God and you define your happiness and your bubbles and that shimmery substance that makes up the bubble comes from within you because if you squint hard enough you can see yourself in it. For that split second that often lasts shorter than the time that it takes you to blink or to scratch your nose out of inability to make eye contact with someone without a distraction, the bubble is an extension of yourself and your power and your ability to control.

And then it is over and the bubble is gone. It is air again. It has, with an onomatopoeia that doesn't work in this circumstance because no sound comes out of it, popped. And you are left opening your eyes without realizing that you closed them or scratching your nose without it itching and you suddenly realize that you have no control. You are not God. Your breath and mouth and lungs have nothing to do with the shimmering. That's all the soap which is made by machines and dolloped into plastic containers with synthesized colors and it's as fleeting as the product that it makes. It pops.

And there it goes. Breathe.