contemplation on steam

making coffee, half-awake, I watched the liquid in the pot heating, saw the steam rising, watched the tiniest of bubbles on the surface.They bounced off each other, jostling at ever-greater speeds as they heated upand I thought about how I saw the individual parts in my mind, imagining all those little beady molecules, picturing charts of fluid dynamics, dreamily considering scientific explanations of speed and temperature rising together and the changes between states of matterand I wondered what it was like before that was understood, when it was fully a mystery, when a liquid was a liquid and not the mostly empty space of atomsand I remembered reading about the discovery of oxygen and of photosynthesisthe invention of airand smiled knowing something is now unknown that will be known in the future and will become a given