bubbles

i blew bubbles in the shower today. it was fun. i remember that i was very amused when as a little boy i discovered that i could make bubbles by forming a film with soap and water and blowing through it. it was somewhat a quantum leap; previously i just marvelled at the film formed and how the colors of the rainbow were captured by it. i was not a very smart kid.

standing there in the wet and dreary toilet that has since been refitted, i felt as if i was on top of the world. curiously, i did not experience a eureka moment and streak through my house and across the garden in elation. i have never had the urge to share my ideas, especially when i was young, because most of my ideas were stupid then, just as they are now. only the time i spent in the shower changed. and of course the amount of foam used increased tremendously, as i spent shower after shower, day after day, for weeks on end perfecting bubbles that were huge and did not break when contacted by the floor. i remember that i once created a bubble the size of my (then) head that survived till i stepped out of the toilet. and i managed to blow a bubble into another. i was five.

time passed, and i grew older. i stopped blowing bubbles in primary school. the novelty had long worn off by then, and i started using adult soap already. adult soap does not foam as easily. and television was no longer a once a week saturday date with power rangers and ninja turtles. it became a daily affair as tv12 improved its content by replacing ethnic shows with cartoons i enjoyed. quite quickly i forgot all about the bubbles. showers became shorter even though i continued to grow taller. anyway, my sight worsened with time, and i was already quite blind without my glasses even before i was 10. i could still see without my glasses then, just as now, but the lack of clarity irritates me much, so i appreciated times without glasses lesser and lesser.

by the time of jric, i had probably forgotten all about bubbles. until now, when i serendipitiously made webs between my fingers and breathed hard through them. with the right soap and the right amount of water and the right force, the bubbles formed and danced around in the air before resting on the walls. for the next half hour i became a child again. and i wasted quite a lot of soap. but i was happier from the cathartic experience. its a drug, really. momentarily, my senses were numbed and i felt the same floaty feeling as when i was five. those images of happier, more innocent times flooded back into my mind like a tsunami, filling every nook and cranny, knocking over those depressing thoughts. its the first time i have associated tsunami with anything positive.

i was happy then, and the feeling lingered on. then the happy tsunami waters receded back to where they came from, leaving behind those towers of depression that had been anchored so strongly by such impeccable foundation. before leaving the shower, i considerately doused the wall with 01Xjet of water and bade goodbye the scum that was the bubbles as it made its trip down the gulley and series of pipes and into the NEWater plant.