Bubble

Bubbles are fleeting and there is little to them. A soap bubble is a floating liquid, an enclosed film containing air. A bubble’s surface tension holds its shape loosely and easily shifts, much like a big drop of water. A bubble’s skin bends light waves and creates iridescent colors to reflect the world around it, but if the colors interfere with each other, the bubble is colorless and has no reflections.

One bubble can become many and many bubbles can become one. With no wind, a bubble is a perfect sphere, but a tiny puff makes it careen into flowing shapes. The liquid surface of a bubble is always in orbit, a moving atmosphere around a hollow planet. A bubble is a boggling toy but is itself barely an object. Photography is a bubble’s perfect partner because each bubble will soon disappear and is easily forgotten. A photograph can capture and freeze an instant of a bubble’s empirical existence, and save for us what we might otherwise simply not see.

A bubble affirms that implausible beauty is set to expose itself, if only we can pause, just briefly, to play.