The Universe of Sparkling Water
Somewhere between the pop of a tab and the hiss of carbonation lives a universe most humans never notice. It's not hidden, merely unrecognized—a shimmering dimension folded between bubbles and breath, suspended in the crystal tension of fizz.
I first stumbled into it on a Tuesday, the kind of day that had the stale breath of eternity. My Studio was quiet, fluorescent lights humming in eternal monotony. That morning, I opened a can of grapefruit sparkling water, and time bent.
Not metaphorically—literally. The moment the carbon dioxide met oxygen, I heard a tone, high and melancholic, like the sound of starlight dying. The bubbles rose, but they didn’t pop. They froze mid-air, each orb a tiny lens showing fragments of alien skies, strange topographies, creatures flickering like old film. I blinked once. Twice. The room warped gently like heat above desert asphalt, and then I was inside it.
The Universe of Sparkling Water is not made of water, though it feels like it is. It’s composed of suspended moments—snapshots of potential, frozen in the act of becoming. Each bubble is a world. Some last for centuries, others for mere seconds, but inside each, an entire cosmos unravels and collapses, again and again.
I drifted.
In one sphere, I saw a planet of salt and silver, where time moved backward and people were born old, shedding years like skin until they became children, then stars. In another, a forest grew on the back of a massive, slumbering insect that dreamed in flowers. Everywhere was light. Iridescent. Weightless. The logic of the place followed rhythm more than reason—physics that moved like music, rules governed not by math but by metaphor.
The first inhabitants I met shimmered like heat waves and spoke in pulses. They were archivists of fizz. They collected the stories from each dying bubble, singing them into crystal canisters that floated like dandelion seeds. They told me their mission: to preserve the moment before reality sets. That brief interval when the possible still outweighs the actual. That, they said, was where the soul of the universe lived—between decision and dissolution.
“How do I get back?” I asked, not because I wanted to leave, but because part of me feared I’d been hallucinating under the weight of loneliness.
“You never left,” one archivist replied, brushing a luminous wing across my brow. “Your kind just forgets.”
And then, with the sound of a pop, I was back. In the lab. The can still cold in my hand, half-full. The world had not changed, but I had. I stared at the rising fizz, watching each bubble for longer than necessary. Wondering which one held a world, which one carried a secret. They popped too fast to tell.
Since then, I’ve dedicated my work not to the mechanics of fluids, but to the poetics of possibility. I open cans with reverence. I listen to carbonation like it’s a symphony. Sometimes, I catch glimpses—refractions of improbable cities, soft whispers in hydrogen tones. I know it’s still there, the universe of sparkling water, fizzing at the edge of awareness. A gentle reminder that even the most ordinary things can be portals to the infinite.
The trick is to notice. To remember. The extraordinary never went away—it just slipped between the bubbles, waiting for us to listen.
