- April 25, 2024
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We waited until the world went dark to light up the beach in color and sound.
After the Polinger plane flew its final lap over the ocean, and the moon rose red behind a shrimp boat in the distance, it was game time. A man pulled a cooler through wet sand and yelled about $1 sodas. A tiny silhouette with a glow stick rested on his shoulders like a fallen neon halo held his father’s hand as he walked along the coast.
The sea whispered grace, and then the sky blew up into a million pieces.
“Waahooo!” a woman yelled, and a spotted boxer darted its head up but seemed to shrug, “Oh, this again.”
“I like the willow tree ones,” Matt Clay said, watching gold dust trickle down like running paint. And Mallorie said, “Yeah, me too. Those are my favorite.”
The louder the sky screamed, the quieter we became, until all there was was “Oh-ing” and “Ah-ing” and the slow routine of waves charging then retreating each time they heard explosions.
Some of us had waited all day for this, camped under tents and with hardly any clothes on. And we were prepared to waste all night, if that’s what it took to repeat the ritual.
Last year was the same, and the year before that, and the year before that. When the finale ends, some stand and others hold tight. Some clap. Teenage lovers grasp each others’ fingers, hoping maybe the show might last till Christmas.
“Is it me or was that longer last year?” Matt Clay asked, as plumes of smoke escaped off the pier toward the horizon. But he knew that it was probably him. Last year, we sat at almost the same spot on the beach. We drank almost the same beer. We told the same jokes.
But last year was also a different job, and a different house, and a different haircut gone. We were younger then and the air was cleaner and fireworks burned a thousand times brighter.
“Well, that was fun, guys. Happy Fourth,” some guy said to somebody else, tucking a chair under his arm with a collapsed umbrella.
And already, we could feel it fading. As the echoes quieted, everyone communed on that beach became less the family they were a minute ago, when all of our necks craned upward and we each knew, by everything around us, that we owned that beach, and that this was home — even if all we did was complain about it every day growing up.
But then the sky sobered up. It snapped out of it. And all of a sudden it was late, and there was work in the morning and traffic to beat. We had to walk away. It was the way things were. We had to all pack up again and go back to being strangers.
