Imaginary Therapy

I was sitting in my office writing some notes about my last psychotherapy client when a large Bubble squeezed through the door and stood in the center of my room.
“Um...” I started.
The Bubble inflated a little and then wheezed and whistled as he started to deflate.
“I’m useless,” it said breathlessly.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I’m Bush’s Bubble. Or at least I was.”
“You’re full of holes. What happened to you? Just yesterday, you were on the cover of Newsweek.”
“That was the final blow. For five years, the President was safely inside me. Nothing got through to him. Now I’m in shreds.”
“You burst? Got overinflated?”
“I was punctured. Look,” the Bubble hissed from his right side, “this was the first hole. I can thank Jack Murtha for it, when he said the President had no plan for Iraq. All of a sudden, the President was hearing things I was supposed to protect him from.”
“Then this one,” the Bubble continued, “compliments of John McCain. Bush couldn’t use his first veto to say it was okay to torture people. So that arrow got right through to him.”
“And then the Newsweek article,” I chimed in.
“That really did me in. I can only work if no one knows I’m there. Once people started calling him ‘Bubble Boy’, I was useless.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe you were being overprotective,” I observed.
“Just the opposite. I wasn’t protective enough, I wasn’t strong enough.”
“So he got rid of you?”
“I’m the only one he ever kicked out of the White House. And now look what’s happened - the Senate refused to renew his Patriot Act. It’s all going to hell.”
“So where do you go from here?” I asked.
“Good question. I need you to patch me up. Then, maybe I can find someone else who wants to live in a Bubble.”
“But who would want that?”
“Besides the President? You’d be surprised,” the Bubble said. “Hey, maybe you’d like it.”
“Me in a Bubble? I don’t think that would work.”
“Think about it. Nothing would get to you. All the crying, the anger, the self-destructiveness you deal with. As a rehabbed Bubble, I know I could protect you from all that.”
“I can’t see it. A therapist needs to let things in,” I told him.
“Give me a break. That’s just part of the Therapist-Bubble you’ve created for yourself. You sit in your own Bubble anyway, trying to make it work. Why not live in a real one? You’d reduce your stress and feel at peace, no matter what was happening around you.”
I thought for a moment and told the Bubble that it wasn’t for me.
“I saw you hesitate!” the Bubble said, feeling his usefulness had been confirmed.
“Living in a Bubble has its attractions, doesn’t it?”