Fireworks

The sky was alight with smiles and love, momentarily, until the shimmering embers twisted and fell and were extinguished and the icons slouched into amorphs and then to nothing. I wonder what the raining shrapnel looked like to the men on the boats whose job it was to set off the fireworks. If they could even see the bits of burnt metal.

“Don’t look so glum, please,” she said. I don’t try to put it on, but I think my resting face is a sad one. I wasn’t unhappy. I cast my gaze down and saw my and her legs rippling and waving in the water’s reflection, and our hunched bodies inclining towards the fireworks, over the lake.

“Do I look sad, do you think?” I asked. “I’m okay.”

“You do look a bit sad, yes. Watch the fireworks. Or we can go to the boardwalk and find something to eat, if you’re bored of the show. It’s whatever you want, I don’t mind.” A massive American flag burst into existence over Lake George. “Or we could go to the bar and talk, I really don’t mind. Just don’t sit there looking so, so glum.”

My gaze was glued to our reflections. I did look a bit tired. I was tired. And I wasn’t smiling. I, sometimes, will subconsciously delve into my sometimes sad state of mind and affect a scowl that I hope reads pensive, mature and concerned. As in, I’ll wade around in the sadness like a man in a mud bath, hoping that by caking up all the muddyness and poo-pooment it will make me feel better. But this kind of mud bath only further dries out the skin, drawing out more sadness for me to wade around in, creating a cycle of wallowing in my own poo-poo attitude towards the world. I wore that scowl then. I was just tired, or my body was, while my mind was unproductively overactive.

“I’m lost in thought, madame. I apologize. I’ll have a more positive demeanor from here on out, if that is what you will,” I snarked. I was lost in thought, but I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. I was fooling myself into thinking that I was intensely focused on the ripples and the manner in which they reflected and distorted the fireworks, trying to find some kind of metaphor to put into a story that had been on my mind for the past few weeks, hoping that the ripples would reveal to me some beautiful way to say about self expression that a hundred other authors will have inevitably said. But in reality I was only thinking about thinking about my observation, without observing anything at all.

“Well, sir, I live for you. My will is yours,” she said, and I turned to her and gave her a weak smile and turned my head up to the sky. She answered my smile with a sympathetic half-smile, which continued even after I turned my head to the sky. I only started looking up because I couldn’t bear that sympathetic half-smile. And then I really waded into the mud bath.

Pom-poms of magnesium blew up with massive booms and cracks that I could scarcely hear; my focus was given solely to my internal monologue. The fact of the matter was that I was sad. Even though I denied it earlier, that little smile that I couldn’t bear that she held on her face as I turned away and looked to the sky with a brave face, that smile brought the acknowledgement out of me. And I got to thinking about why I felt shitty, and I realized that I had no real reason. It was just the case that, for whatever reason, several weeks ago I had some anxiety-causing incident, and even though the incident passed and I was safe– as always– the unease I felt persisted, solely because it had once existed for a real reason. The malaise, which was at one point just a reaction from some stimulus, had, over time, become both the cause and effect of itself. To the point where I could not, nor can I even now, remember that initial stimulus. It was as if I had tripped and bruised my knee, gotten up, went about life, but the bruise was growing and replenishing the humors that constituted it, to the point where my body was continuing to bruise my knee for no reason besides the fact that it was bruised, and should thus stay bruised. And I looked to my right and then back up again, watching all the fireworks that are designed to catch attention and to distract, and I knew that distraction was to be my remedy– I eventually forgot about the bruise– and I just couldn’t. Couldn’t lose myself in the world around me as I should have. And that realization made me anxious. I felt trapped inside my own head and I did not like it. The only way I knew to help myself was to wallow in pity and obsess over my anxiety, and that method of help was, obviously, detrimental to my getting better.

I started to look around me, all frantically like I had done something wrong or that I had somewhere to be desperately soon; I wrung my hands constantly and kicked my feet against the wall I sat on, squirming around on my butt, all anxiously. And my face was positively pitiful. My date asked me again if I was okay and I looked at her and absently nodded my head, which was unsatisfactory to her. She asked again why didn’t I just want to get up and leave, or talk about whatever I was so obviously anxious about, and I just shrugged my shoulders, again absently, and kept on wringing my hands and bouncing my legs. She said that I should really just talk, that it’d be better than what I was doing, and I didn’t respond, I was out of it. Then she said that everyone in the world could line up with flowers, waiting to give me a kiss, or to talk to me about whatever it is that I would want, or to whisper sweet words of care and affection into my ear whilst massaging my back and feet, and I would be too distracted with my own thoughts to even see the line of people forming in front of me.

Then a little kid, maybe a boy of four or five ran up behind us, as I was preparing to respond in some witty way or something like that. He had apparently lost his parents and came up to us for help, walking silently up behind me and tapping me on the shoulder while I was lost in thought. And it scared the shit out of me.

The little jump that the scare gave me, coinciding with my wobbling and unease, sent me falling off of the little stone wall we sat on, and I plunged into the lake with a high-pitched scream. And all I could think about was how wet I was.