A desperate writer's reflections on rebirth.

Journal Entry | June 17, 2024

I don’t remember when fireworks lost their magic. 

When I was young, I watched them with wide eyes and a slight part to my lips, bewildered by the way they exploded into colorful bloom and fell from the sky in a glittery downpour. I delighted in the sound that accompanied them, as sharp and deliberate as a bullet through drywall, and the collective awe from the audience that followed. The air was thick with the scent of grilled hot dogs, and I swatted mosquitos from my ankles as the skeletal flowers swelled across the sky. With my gaze definitively secured on them, I wondered how we had invented such a thing out of the same sticks and mud I laid my picnic blanket on. 

Weeks ago, I watched fireworks on a Hawaiian beach, and they fell disappointingly short of my expectations. The flowers closer resembled trampled clovers, and the underwhelming pops followed by a weak exhale of color only grated against me. Instead, my mind wandered, sweeping the tops of the buildings below it. Utterly disappointed, I returned to my hotel room that night wondering if all that I enjoyed now was doomed to lose its color over time. Whether I’d only appreciated the fireworks before due to my lack of brain development and whether my childlike amusement now trailed behind in the shreds of a thinning cocoon.

I thought about beginnings, and more specifically, the fact that I’d already experienced a lot of them. I wondered what it would be like to wake up for the first time again and open my eyes to the light fixture dangling from the ceiling and watch the color bleed out. What it would be like to read for the first time again, and whether that learning curve would be as equally steep as it had been when I was a child. If I opened my laptop for the first time now and created a new document, would my fingers still remember their positions against the keyboard? Would my mind still fire its synapses and piece the alphabet together into an iteration I hadn’t created before? 

I’m a writer. I’m forever seeking to experience the world for the first time from a different perspective. To begin a new story is to rouse from sleep and survey the curiosities of the world around me through a new lens. The writer's job is to explain what’s been said before by thousands and felt by billions, to dress up the familiar sensations of daily life then strip it bare to pick apart its subtleties. Everything I write has been an effort to wear the skin of someone I’ll never be. My works have transported me to lands far beyond unreachable with my one attempt at life, and every time I open the document and let it swallow me, I feel myself develop from the fetus all over again. 

I paced the sea long after the fireworks ended, thinking about sailors guided by the moon. I pictured them following the patterns of the stars, seeking direction from an unsympathetic, agendaless universe. Though hours had passed since sundown, dark bodies still struggled against the water, parents and children surfacing to go home. Above them, low planes glided over the waves, so close I thought I might touch them if I jumped high enough, and as eight melted into nine, the clouds parted to let the moon bleed. I took note of the slow deliberation of the sea and the pronounced chaos of the waves. The give and take, the push and pull, and the warmth of the acoustic guitar seeping from the shopping street filled me with a sense of rebirth. The world shifted into something different, each element of the beach taking on a translucent quality I hadn't noticed before. Reality became hyperreality, and in the rhythms of my surroundings I found truth.

The waves will whisper to you if you’re quiet enough. The words will find you if you give them the chance. You will find the glimmer that breathes beneath the mundane, and you’ll open your heart to the fireworks again.