They don’t tell you about what lingers after – not the pollution or those fiery regurgitations but the wispy krakens, the spiders and their webs. Cracks in the window of the sky. Desire lines circumvent the cumuli, trails forging intersections before they ever burst, and the sky goes lighter each time these paths retread. You know that there is no such thing as independence.

You remember the first time you saw the show. After years of just hearing them through the walls of your bedroom and seeing them on the local news, trying to match them up, your parents finally took you, and it seemed that day that you had grown to their equal. Not just awake when the night sky finally overtook the summer, but outside and celebrating, and the symphony played that sophisticated sound, each song heralding the coming display, red-white-and-blue carpet unfurling. You were patient, for that was what grownups were, for the sun’s rippling grand descent was revolution enough for your young eyes trained in black and white.

Then they arrived. The most colorful memory you carry, the fulfillment of what a rainbow could only vaguely promise. Massive pom-poms like stardust, sprinkling shards of comets. You told yourself then that you would have to remember it, those constellations in miniature. You wanted to hold onto that color, to let it bleed your mind like a tie-dye and return whenever you closed your eyes. You had never seen a beauty like that before, never felt such vibrancy swelling in your chest and all around you. This was art, you knew, painting on that darkening canvas. Its deafening was defining, necessary and fitting, reverberating in your chest. All of you awoke to this splendor, all subject to it. You could not speak over its glory.

Tonight, you wear earplugs. It is hard to not be cynical. You know now that the local news anchors aren’t really celebrities, and you’re skeptical of their exuberant commentary. In their words, the corporate sponsor always precedes “Independence Day.” One nation, under a gas station. They’ve suffocated the stars and offer these flickers as replacement. A nation that built so many rockets they had to use the leftovers for pleasure. A nation fed to equate explosions with patriotism. They shout before the show that soldiers are the bravest people, their voices never diverging from that vapid cheerfulness as they read the stats on those killed in Vietnam, a place still described as alien, as if it’s not that same sky. You can’t hate the soldiers, but you can hate the warmongers who demand you honor them, and the conflation they present here surely exploits the troops, just as they always have. It’s the soldiers who remember most vividly, so violently resuscitated by these thundering echoes. This is the one day you’re meant to forget the sins of the founding, fondling fathers. There should be enough things to be proud of to last a single night, and yet they make it so hard for you. The distraction is so obvious, even the main event so manufactured and belittling. You are almost scared for them to appear, that prostitution of the senses, worried of the confirmation that even they will no longer have an impact.

The concessions feel cheap. The patriotism trashy. The audience skirts on kitsch, hills of faces stagnant in sunglasses, all adorned in the country’s colors, tan lines peeking past their shoulders. Has the distinction of this wasteland ceremony vanished, or is it just your fading wonder? You notice those ahead of you restless, checking the time on their phones. So familiar to you, what had once been foreign icons. Just as the night, they all now share those dark and empty screens, all waiting for them to shake and light up. But the news is never news, the music more a tease. So religious and operatic, now simply carnival tunes, and maybe overuse makes this inevitable, the epic made common.

This year, you sit with your friends, shareholders in this iteration, and you wonder how they feel. You owe it to yourself to keep going, as long as you can remember that joy, to preserve that old sublimity, the charade of worship. They must hold these memories, too.

The overture culminates, its truth unleashing, noises in every direction, the tyrant blaring as all its subordinates chime and chatter around, and then they unite, marching and crashing. This is a stampede, a monument, the suicide of Jericho. The new instruments ascend, producing this illusory dawn, and – oh! – the explosions still inspire. This still brings something out, the only moment you could say something like this. You have to remember this is history, but yet you must add to it, this night itself made momentous beyond the naïve pilgrimage, beyond the loop of a day, a holiday that boldly wears its date with year excised. This union does not allow progression, but there are still things worth clinging to. There is no pause in these volleys of inferno, shattering heavens. There is an eye in the sky, a white that dithers beyond these instants, these tears, and it opens and blinks and will yet collapse.

You turn to her when the light’s too much because hers is a little more on the inside. And you smirk begrudgingly at the invading thought that the sight of her is just as beautiful, too mawkish to even approach authenticity, so shallow to compare the dynamism of a person with the limp discharges overhead. She’s leaning back, propped up on her arms, and she’s clutching a bundle of grass in her fist, idle thumb flicking one of the captive blades. You look back up, through that kaleidoscopic barrage, and behind they have invented a cloud deeper than any other, tracings all twisted into some opaque tornado, and you know this cannot be undone. You look back at her. There is no independence.

“Hey, uh, I really like you, Abby.”

– Jonathan Kelley

Author’s Note: “Illuminations” came to me last Fourth of July. I’d guess the main idea is that our experiences become less our own as we grow older, our personal wonder complicated by new awareness of the world around us. However, running parallel to our adolescent formations of social, political, and environmental consciousness are the nascent little crushes that somehow seem just as important if not even contingent, so effortlessly invading the narrator’s train of thought.