before the explosion

You have to hold your head high, because people would pay money to see you fall. Look at them, standing in line at the theater, dollar bills smashed in sweaty palms, desperate to see some misery that isn't in their own heads, that isn't in their own lives. Desperate to grab onto some emotion that they can own for an hour or two, desperate to watch it fade away into the night as they leave.

A ghost of a feeling, a whisper of a time they knew what they wanted, knew what they felt, and felt it with all of their heart, felt that their chest and heart and lungs would burst with it. That feeling just before the explosion, just before the firecracker becomes a firework, as the last thread burns and simmers, and you know what's coming but it's too late to stop it, to late to do anything but watch the beauty and light and horror and glory.

We used to try to live those moments. Now we pay money to feel them float through us. Because we fear that uncontrollable moment, when it's out of our hands. So we act as though we can control it, turn the feelings on and off with the moving pictures on our screen and then move into our own lives as shadows, drained of feeling, drained of fear.

But we forget that no matter how hard we try we cannot ever truly live like that. We cannot have the firework if we won't light the firecracker. If we don't take the risk and chance of that moment, the moment filled with gasps and wonder and worry and question and dispute and love and suspense and fear, we will never see what it becomes. A light beaming through the streets, tiny fire sprites dancing on the pavement, a belief in magic.