Bubbles

Have you ever watched a bubble, like a soap bubble or a bubble blown from a tiny plastic wand, as it flies and glitters in the air?

A bit of breath, the essence of life itself, breathed into something so fragile and beautiful. Translucent colors, every color of the rainbow, wash over the round surface and sparkle like crystals in the sun.

The bubble moves about on a breeze, blown back and forth at the will of the wind and bursts the moment it comes into contact with something rougher than itself. If it meets another bubble it either absorbs the other, bounces away, or the strength of the other absorbs it, partially if not in whole. Any way you look at it, the bubble is changed by its contact with another.

A lone bubble, however, floats in the air, spinning its globe of color for its entire existence--a matter of several seconds. It turns and spins and floats and alters nothing of itself or anything around it but the air in which it hangs. It fades. The breath within it longs to rejoin the breeze from wince it was birthed. It presses ever harder against the translucent flesh until it fades entirely.

It does not burst, does not pop. It merely fades into the very air it once contained, which rejoins the breeze.

It disappears, stops existing.

And all around it remains as though the bubble never was.