Happy We Finally Mailed Some People About Our Independence As Of Two Days Ago Day!
I feasted my eyes on exactly one firework, a sparkler of some kind, released on some faraway hill-top that we could see from our living room through the glass sliding doors that open onto the balcony. It looked like the glittering, stylized image of a palm tree, and then it looked like nothing.
That was while we were watching a movie, which was okay, although it ended badly. But really my celebration took place earlier in the evening, around ten, when the sky 's velvet-dull black was still fading to blue, especially around the edges; like a bruise, or a backlit plum.
We live near a small Lutheran school, which is set higher up on the hillside than we are, on the opposite side of and a little ways up the narrow road. My mother had gone out to try and see the fireworks from its parking lot; she'd shouted for me to come with her, but I was delayed by a charming internet stranger, so by the time I came upstairs she was gone. I ran out into the street. Frankly I was surprised by how dark it was, out there: I couldn't see the moon at all, although I remember, yesterday, seeing it during the day, high and halved and transparent in the blue sky, its craters opening into blue and being filled by blue. I ran out into the street and it was as if I was running through empty air towards a black screen, the top cut to lace in places to imitate the patterns of foliage and rooftops, and then, rising abruptly behind it, the fully if soberly colored and voluminous sky, the only real part of it, spread over me and hanging down like the underside of a hammock. Of course in reality there was a great deal of light pollution, if not on our street then in our city, and there were not so very many stars there, and most of them barely visible, faint prickling itches at the back of the eye rather than actual objects: like perfect, geometric points, vanishingly small. A few scattered brightnesses and a crowded sense of things about to burst out, that was it for the stars. Still I was-- impressed? I don't know.
At my father's old house, you could see oodles of stars, white and precise on the night's flat cheek, like a scattering of salt on a drowned girl's skin after the wind and sun have pulled all the water from her flesh. You could also hear things, moving, in the bushes, and if zombies had happened to attack, you could have died alone.
Anyway, I ran-- I don't remember the last time I ran, outside, but my shoes were not on properly and they flapped and the ground pushed up against my feet, and the air was mobile and cool and sweet, and it was okay-- around the curve of the hill, and up the drive to the school's parking lot (there's a funny story about the school's playground, two, actually, that I want to write down here sometime, but not now) where there were streetlamps, amber-yellow hexagons partially obscured by the leaves of eucalyptus trees, and punctured with translucency due to the nature of the bulbs used, and very much more like jewels than the stars. For whatever reason it was there, in between their narrow skirts of fluorescence, that my eyes seemed to adjust; on the way back I could make out much more of my surroundings, even though as far as I can tell it should have worked exactly the other way around; but what do I know, really, about eyes?
My mother emerged from the dark at the back of the parking lot, where the playground is; I saw her shirt first, pale, and her shins, pale, and her face.
We were on the wrong side, she said, to see anything. She said she was sorry she'd made me come up.
I listened to the sound of the fireworks, which was soft and heavy, like thunder wrapped in old blankets, or like impossibly hard rain on a metal roof, or like the waves of a blood-hungry ocean breaking on the rocks, which could be heard better out in the cold, and was harder, out there, to accurately describe (three similes, Jesus, soon I'll be breaking out the scientific terms and the vague references to special effects technology). I said it was okay. We walked back, not really together, moving in and out of each other's orbits, her more or less ahead, and behind us the world closed up like an oyster, the slippery meat sucked out.
That was while we were watching a movie, which was okay, although it ended badly. But really my celebration took place earlier in the evening, around ten, when the sky 's velvet-dull black was still fading to blue, especially around the edges; like a bruise, or a backlit plum.
We live near a small Lutheran school, which is set higher up on the hillside than we are, on the opposite side of and a little ways up the narrow road. My mother had gone out to try and see the fireworks from its parking lot; she'd shouted for me to come with her, but I was delayed by a charming internet stranger, so by the time I came upstairs she was gone. I ran out into the street. Frankly I was surprised by how dark it was, out there: I couldn't see the moon at all, although I remember, yesterday, seeing it during the day, high and halved and transparent in the blue sky, its craters opening into blue and being filled by blue. I ran out into the street and it was as if I was running through empty air towards a black screen, the top cut to lace in places to imitate the patterns of foliage and rooftops, and then, rising abruptly behind it, the fully if soberly colored and voluminous sky, the only real part of it, spread over me and hanging down like the underside of a hammock. Of course in reality there was a great deal of light pollution, if not on our street then in our city, and there were not so very many stars there, and most of them barely visible, faint prickling itches at the back of the eye rather than actual objects: like perfect, geometric points, vanishingly small. A few scattered brightnesses and a crowded sense of things about to burst out, that was it for the stars. Still I was-- impressed? I don't know.
At my father's old house, you could see oodles of stars, white and precise on the night's flat cheek, like a scattering of salt on a drowned girl's skin after the wind and sun have pulled all the water from her flesh. You could also hear things, moving, in the bushes, and if zombies had happened to attack, you could have died alone.
Anyway, I ran-- I don't remember the last time I ran, outside, but my shoes were not on properly and they flapped and the ground pushed up against my feet, and the air was mobile and cool and sweet, and it was okay-- around the curve of the hill, and up the drive to the school's parking lot (there's a funny story about the school's playground, two, actually, that I want to write down here sometime, but not now) where there were streetlamps, amber-yellow hexagons partially obscured by the leaves of eucalyptus trees, and punctured with translucency due to the nature of the bulbs used, and very much more like jewels than the stars. For whatever reason it was there, in between their narrow skirts of fluorescence, that my eyes seemed to adjust; on the way back I could make out much more of my surroundings, even though as far as I can tell it should have worked exactly the other way around; but what do I know, really, about eyes?
My mother emerged from the dark at the back of the parking lot, where the playground is; I saw her shirt first, pale, and her shins, pale, and her face.
We were on the wrong side, she said, to see anything. She said she was sorry she'd made me come up.
I listened to the sound of the fireworks, which was soft and heavy, like thunder wrapped in old blankets, or like impossibly hard rain on a metal roof, or like the waves of a blood-hungry ocean breaking on the rocks, which could be heard better out in the cold, and was harder, out there, to accurately describe (three similes, Jesus, soon I'll be breaking out the scientific terms and the vague references to special effects technology). I said it was okay. We walked back, not really together, moving in and out of each other's orbits, her more or less ahead, and behind us the world closed up like an oyster, the slippery meat sucked out.