Bubble
By Charles Byrne
even pre-prepandemic, we were bubbled: Netflix- & Amazon sealed: pixelated miniscule-screen freeze-frames: air encircled in plastic air bubbles with a tiny black box at the bottom: discrete behaviorist levers to parcel out the dopamine drip: our secure little bubbles: gossip is thirty-mile zoning about those who may be siblings from god but you do not know from Adam: politics is cable news networking your enemy of God: they are no longer the domain of the cold-coffee Bloomsbury coffeehouse: the coffee ceremony in Addis Ababa: the teahouse in Bursa: the wine table in Babylon: not to mention the mere good-neighbor fence: memes journeyed then but ambled at a measured pace: now micro-units of adrenaline are administered as quickly as the ones & zeros can be transmitted from your enemy’s tweet-finger: we were once bottlenecked to handfuls of breeding pairs: then our population dipped only during the undulations of the Black Death: all other times traversing skyward: twice as many alive as when I was born: frothing over into every inhabitable nook & cranny: genes traverse the world & viruses catch a ride: the nearer we get to one another the further we retreat inside: like the politeness of the Tokyo subway: the mere thought of touch feels like corruption now: but many crave the skin-on-skin of when we party like it’s 2024: or more accurately the perceived skin-to-skin touch that is the mind’s interpretation of electron repulsion: but the hook-up is our secure little bubble too: our effort to retreat from the Universe’s expanse: to split it into manageable parts however illusory: even pre-postpandemic one senses it: the pain that is predictable trumps the pain that wanders.
This story originally appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 19. Support local booksellers and independent publishers by ordering a print copy of the magazine.
Photo by Zoran Borojevic