THE BUBBLE

I sit in the car driving home in the dark at the end of what I calculate to be day 71 in the bubble. It’s Sunday evening and I see people heading out for the night, couples laughing and joking. I see families with pushchairs heading home from their days of fun and frolics, or a birthday party, or just a visit to see grandma.

And I am in the bubble.

Through brightly lit windows I see crowds of carefree people laughing, joking, drinking. All of them appear to be having a normal night out with their friends and families and lovers. Oblivious, unknowing, uncaring. Their lives an untroubled sea of tranquillity and normality. They are unaware of how easily that the normality can disappear. How it can just fade away and escape from their grasp on the slightest whim of fate.

And I am in the bubble…

I hear laughter through the wall; the neighbours enjoying their Sky TV and a few beers. Howling at the hilarity of someone’s latest comment, or the excitement of some sporting event. They are giggling with a knowing intimacy, enjoying a care-free quiet night in without a worry in the world.

But they don’t know I am in the bubble…

I feel like running away. I feel like getting in the car and just driving until I run out of petrol or roads. I want to overlook the sea and watch the waves crash in. I want to get away from telephones and responsibilities and the endless thinking and planning. I don’t want to have to talk about it any more. I don’t want the continuous worry. I want it to stop. I want to get away from it all.

But I’m trapped in the bubble…

The cycle of work, eat, visit, sleep is all I have. All day. Every day. Unchanging. Unblinking. No possibility of change. Every hope of change cruelly dashed by fate and circumstance and need and responsibility. Each evening punctured with the latest instalment of nothingness, the mind scraped for the latest scrap of desperate new news, anything at all that I can think of despite being shut off from the world at large.

Inside the bubble.

Nobody else can see it. Nobody else is aware of it. Nobody else can understand it.

I can see them all, running free through their lives, disconnected. Either unable or unwilling to even attempt to burst my bubble and set me free. Not even aware that the bubble is there. Occasionally I spot another bubble, but they can’t see me in mine and can’t hear my cries, as I can’t hear theirs.

Just a sea of isolated bubbles floating through so many lives hoping and yet fearing for the day they might pop.

I am in the bubble.