The Queen of Bubbles

When I was young--maybe six or so--I used to pretend I was the queen of bubbles in the bath. Every pocket of air was one of my subjects. I would slide against the end of the tub away from the faucet and make waves to bring the bubbles towards me. Then, I would cover my body with the groups of bubbles, trying to cover my body in the white fluff. Bubbles were odd to me. They looked like something you can just eat. Like in the Regina Spektor song "Music Box" where she sings "But when i do the dishes
I run the water very very very hot
And then i fill the sink to the top with bubbles of soap
And then i set all the bottle caps i own afloat
And it's the greatest voyage in the history of plastic
And then i slip my hands in and start to make waves
And then i dip my tongue in a take a taste
It tastes like soap but it doesn't realy taste like soap
And then i lower in my whole mouth and take a gulp
...and start to feel mortality sorround me
You think they'll be like eating clouds, but then it's yucky, and bad for you. It makes you sick.

You know when you find out you can't sit on a cloud? That's it's made out of water? It's like that.

I was really small then, and I could lie on my back without my toes or head touching either end, and with my arms held tight to my body. I could hold that for a while, weightless, like I was floating, except everything was warm...

In swimming pools my mother used to put one hand on my back, and I would spread out my limbs and just lie there, trying to forget her hand was holding me up. We called it "the starfish." My dad used to throw me and my sister into the pool to see who made the bigger splash.

I want to make the bigger splash. I want to do this and be that and just be something, not just some little kid playing in the bath. I hate the idea of just getting a job and being lost. Here you have people wondering what you will be and what you will do with all your potential. And then you start using up your potential, and then you aren't interesting. It's like one of those movies that you watch just to see what happens, and when you guess the ending, it's all pointless, and you are out of popcorn and there's no reason to be there anymore.

Energy is always conserved, and I suppose you can turn your potential energy into kinetic. And then I suppose you move a whole lot, or maybe you move faster, or whatever you like, because you are moving towards the same thing and no matter what path you take you die in the end anyways.

I play sims 2 a lot. The thing about sims is that they are supposed to be human, but there are a lot of things that are just wrong. Sometimes I feel like humans are like that. In the Bible--if you believe in that stuff--it's like God made us in his image, but we just didn't meet the standard, like he made a vital mistake or something. That's probably sacrilege, but you get the idea? Like we are all made to be something else, and we try to be that, but we just aren't. So we look for meaning, but our definition of ourselves is all off because we think we are human but we are actually sims.

It's like in English class when you talk about how this represents that and you make meaning of every comma and syllable. And you talk about how the tempest is about tensions between nature and nurture, and somebody asks you what it's about, and you forget about that its about a storm.

Or when you forget that Anne Frank was a real person, and the clock outside her window was a real clock and it doesn't represent anything.

Sometimes I think I am God's gift to earth, and then I tell myself that I am nothing, and on a scale of importance I am subatomic, but I can't really believe that because I'm sure I walk on water, and I hate myself for that.

Maybe I am subatomic. People say there is another dimension on a subatomic scale. Maybe that's the problem with us all: there's this random dimension of meaning that we don't actually have, like if a circle thought it had a third dimension, and just felt like something was missing. Maybe for humans all there is is time and space, but meaning is the fifth dimension. We live in a world of meaning, but nothing has any. Or maybe that's just me and everyone else has all the right amounts of dimentions.

Because I think I am the splash, but I'm only the queen of bubbles.