Listening to fireworks being set off by the locals — not the organized town or city displays, but the people I’m stuck calling my neighbors — the ones who somehow get a thrill out of blasting sky rockets and bomb‑like booms that shake the walls and crawl right up your spine. Shianna is pressed against me, trembling, looking for shelter, for safety, maybe even for some explanation I can’t give her. And in the thick, steamy night, with the air cracking open around us, I found myself wondering what it would be like to be a child in a war‑torn country, hearing real bombs dropped by adults fighting over reasons that never make sense to the ones who suffer for them. To watch your home, your school, the field where you ran and laughed blown into pieces you don’t recognize. To lie in your bed and hear explosions creeping closer and closer to the place you’re trying to make a life, and to wonder what your world will look like when morning comes — if morning comes at all.
And sitting there with my cat shaking against me, I realized how easy it is for a whole life to be reduced to waiting for the next sound, the next shock, the next thing that might take everything. The fireworks stopped eventually. The quiet came back. But it wasn’t the kind of quiet that comforts. It was the kind that reminds you how fragile the world really is, and how thin the line is between the night you survive and the one you don’t.
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Rambling Harbor 
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