I’ve been living in bubbles lately.
I first noticed it when I was driving down the street two weeks ago with my twin brother, Gus, en route to my immunotherapy infusions. We have our routine down. He comes over to pick me up, much like he has quietly and selflessly picked me up almost every weekend we’ve lived in San Francisco to go for a hike, yet our destination this time is different. Our banter is the same, a joke about our differing music taste, an update on our lives, an attempt at a phone call to our mom. He takes a day off work every twenty-one days to go with me, a gesture I insist every time is unnecessary, but the cancer ward is a hard place to be alone.
As we drove, bubbles flew off the side of a building onto the cars in the street, eliciting squeals of delight from me as they bounded onto the roofs, incandescent spheres of light. I giggled as we moved past, Gus slowing the car down so I could enjoy, enraptured in joy, all versions of myself simultaneously enthralled.
The bubbles flew alone and in clusters. A pair of bubbles rose above, the wall between them flat.
On the Fourth of July, bubbles again. There were the spritely bubbles blasting out of a plastic flower held in a toddler’s fist. There was my friend Yves’ magnificent Burning Man car, Apollonia, a constellation of bubbles. By afternoon, I spiraled and spiraled dancing in a cloud of them, each leaving only a small wet mark before vanishing.
It was my first year celebrating on the west coast, trading golf carts for art cars. I was homesick all day, my mind caught in flat images from other years’ Fourths, wishing I could change a frame.
In front of me, bubbles floated into the air.
Holy shit, I’m alive. I thought, suddenly overwhelmed with the joyousness of the moment. We take this aliveness for granted. We feel entitled to our hundred-plus years and a clean bill of health, unaware of what is required to maintain it.
I am alive, dancing in the summer sun, on a perfect foggy California day, underneath strings of mirrored circles on string catching the light, trading selfies with my mom in our matching wigs across the country, swimming in a sea of friends when I should have been dead.
When it wasn’t clear I would be able to walk again. I am dancing. I nearly cry with every step.
As the music hit a crescendo, one of my best friends hugged me extra hard, thanking God in the middle of the dance floor for my life. He’d spent last year scared he was saying goodbye.
The last line of Ada Limon’s poem, The Raincoat, came to mind. She explores a mother’s selfless acts, unnoticed through childhood, yet understood later in life: “My god, I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her raincoat / thinking it was somehow a marvel that I never got wet.”
On America’s 250th birthday, the parade is filled with angry political floats. We live in a bubble, a protected safe bubble, unaware of the horror that exists elsewhere in the world. I am the first to perpetuate it; my reluctance to read current news to maintain my mental state keeps me blissfully unaware. I hate guns, but I’m acutely aware that I have no idea how to defend myself. Every street was once a dark alleyway. I think of how many people it must have taken to keep me, this country, our values, alive. All of us under raincoats we have never seen.
At its last moments, as the soap walls thin, the bubble shifts from clear to rainbow. How achingly vivid life becomes at its most compressed.
The bubble pops, and you realize that there is no one there to save you. The ambulance in Morocco didn’t have the defibrillator that a member of my community needed. The countless doctors you’ve gone to don’t know how to cure you. It is cold and empty. You are alone, and in that aloneness, you are the only one who can save your life, and even then it’s all a dice thrown in the dark.
As I danced with the bubbles, I saw the world through the curved walls of soap, imagining what it might be like to live inside one. I’ve often fantasized about being a James Bond villain, just for their lairs. Following my eye surgery during COVID, Gus gave me an architectural textbook on them to comfort me. Dr. No’s is my favorite. His is an underwater cave with convex windows, making “minnows feel like whales.” I imagined myself in the bubbles, looking around, the world distorted into a technicolor fishbowl contortion.
I squint and see everything horizon to horizon, visible at once. The lens distorts, amplifying anything near me, shrinking the edges. A wall of bubbles rises up, holding hundreds of worlds in miniature, each with a tiny me in the center.
I see the world refracted, contracted, swirled, colors amplifying into a pop.
