Fire in the sky
Coming home from my aunt and uncle's today, traversing the highway connecting western Chicago suburbia and urbia, I saw fireworks. Not fireworks like I saw last night, like I've seen for years, sitting in a crowd of thousands, our gazes statically fixed on no more than a fifteen degree slice of sky. No, tonight was different. As my uncle and I journeyed on, we saw fireworks from all around. Some just off the highways, hundreds of feet away. Others, miles away on the horizon. Ceaseless, rhythmic, omnipresent explosions of fire and fury. Some boasted spherical symmetry, giant balls of sparks across the night sky. Others embraced chaos, their fiery embers shooting off in directions seeming to defy laws governing momentum. The breadth and depth of the visible spectrum was exposed by a thousand anonymous pyrotechnicians; never before have I seen a mere three hundred nanometer range perform as brilliantly as it did tonight. The sky was alight with unending showers of sparks; only panoramic vision could capture them all. By the time we arrived at Hyde Park, the sky was thick with rocket exhaust. The smell of sulfur hung thickly in the air. Even after I was surrounded by buildings, obscuring my view of ascending rockets and descending debris, I could still hear the detonations. They came from all around, and a part of me wished they would never stop. It was an experience I shall never forget.