Bursting Bubbles
A very personal piece that I wrote (rough) when I found out that a friend had passed away this year. I just had to get it out, somehow, even if this is rough and unedited.
Bursting Bubbles
Life begins as a blank playing board with no squares, no dice and certainly characters to speak of. Bar yourself, course. You take centre stage. For, in this game, you are the most important player of all. This is the one time where you may look at yourself and see the wonder that is you, all powerful and, undoubtedly, all attention on you. But this board only takes your attention and yours alone, for everyone else in the world has their own board to tend to, to cherish and care for until the end of their days. You command this corner of your world - what makes you who you are.
Yet you do not control the board, not in its entirety. You may reign over some sections, domineer and take squares for your own, but there is no way for you to stop the steady progression of life, time ticking by second by irrevocable second.
Watch that clock: your life is slipping away.
You are not alone on the board for long, however, swiftly joined by the first players in your life - your parents and family. Whether they stay with you or leave within those first, crucial, few days, is beyond you. It dictates your future. Will their bubbles be bright and shiny, gleaming additions to your board, or will they sullen with time, scarring what should have been your design? Only time will tell.
But usually they stay, those first few bubbles. They gleam with faces, smiles and joy radiating from those who surround you. You know little of your world at this point and will not understand its true nature until years have passed. And even then, true understanding is debatable. But the bubbles help, the faces and smiles. Under the normal course of events, these faces blossom into colourful bubbles on your playing board, a rainbow of family that stretches further and further as you move forward, a willing player so far in this game you've been thrust into.
You have no idea what kind of world you've been thrust into, but, in your youngest years, you cannot understand this. You understand that the game will end, one day, but that is the extent of this.
Better get busy playing.
Years pass and you learn that the number of those bubbles can fall as well as rise. This is confusing, at first. How can a face simply disappear? Yet you can see the shadow of them there, a glistening memory like the teardrop on your cheek. There and not there. How are you to make sense of this? Your young years spin and spin and spin until you must take hold of the concept of death.
And, to confuse matters further, death does not always mean the end of a life. It could be a death of the relationship, the bubble fading and fading until it is as if it is never there. These losses sting, an undercurrent of pain that you feel you should understand and yet cannot. Why have you been abandoned? Why is your board emptier than before? They may return, bubbles swelling into life again at a later date, but there is no way for you to know this right now. There is no way for you to predict the future, except to grasp its thread and live it in the moment.
So you can only continue, as the board shifts and changes beneath your feet and the bubbles sway and dip, numbers ever changing with the tides of the world. It's unstable and it rocks, bowing and threatening to buckle, yet all you can do is duck your head down against the wind and grind through it, step by agonising step.
Perhaps you even pop a few bubbles of your own, self-destruction at its finest. Do you really need all these bubbles cluttering up your playing board anyway? Are they necessary? Could you do without them? The mass of sparkling colour does grow tiring at times. So you trim them down, cut them out, make your board more appealing, more manageable.
Is less truly more?
But, as time goes by, you start to realise something. It comes slowly, at first, like the trickle of water at the mouth of a river, which swells into a creek and then a stream, eventually becoming a winding, unstoppable force ever rushing towards the arms of the ocean. Some of those bubbles that you've either destroyed or have burst entirely from the cause of outside factors, will not return. In some, the finality of death is very real. And this death is coming for your bubble too.
Slowly, the game changes. Instead of racing to live, you're clawing at bubbles, watching them pop as those who've played in your game for years on years are snuffed from existence. There's no calling these back. Once they're gone, they're gone forever. And it reminds you of your fate as a player in another person's game on another board much like this one. You are a bubble too and, one day, you too shall disappear in that final burst of muted colour.
Too quick! Life's passing you by! You forgot to play the game! And so you scream and thrash and lunge and try to grab those bubbles remaining, pulling them closer and closer even as they shatter. Your board is a battlefield and there is nothing you can do to ease the constant flow of death, one life ending after the other. Cry if you will. Wailing never stopped anyone's bubbles from bursting. This game of life really is a lost cause and perhaps you could have made more of it if only you'd realised that sooner.
You begin as a blank canvas and end tattered and torn. Yet it's your decision as to how you reach that state, curled into yourself and ready for the beyond.
And so, one day, you too shall give up, collapse to your board and bow your head to the rainbow of blood. All the bubbles will burst, one by one, and then there will be you. Just you. Only you. Facing a blank playing board, you will find yourself completely and utterly alone.
And then your bubble bursts too.
And then there is nothing.