“I know well what lies beyond my sleeping refuge: A nightmare I built my own world to escape.”

Imaginary, Evanescence

Bubbles floated all around her, big and shiny, dancing with the multicolored rainbows that bounced off of their translucent skin. She was floating too, her and the bubbles all mingling in front of a blue patterned background that seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. It went on as far as the eye could see and yet had no visible magnitude or direction that she could discern. She almost laughed at that thought; it seemed to be funny in some mysterious way. Something to do with mathematics perhaps? She did laugh then. There was no math in this magical land of massive rainbow soap bubbles. There was no anything in this world, just her and the bubbles floating around all day and night. Yet there was no day or night either, just time, and to be honest, the girl was not sure if even that existed here. She could not remember how she had gotten here, only that she wanted to stay.

Stay? As if she would go anywhere else. As if she could go anywhere else. For a second she thought she vaguely remembered another place, a time before this, where both good things and bad things existed, where the background changed constantly, where the bubbles did not have diameters twice the length of her body- and where others like her existed. It was this last thought that presented to her the full absurdity of her imaginings.

There were no others.

Only her, and the bubbles.

                                 ****

From a small city on the outskirts of London, a man made his weekly trip to the hospital to visit his comatose daughter.