When the after-image fades, you can finally smell the sulfur and smoke.

We sit on the grass with our friends, watching the fireworks, and his knowledge of the inner-working of pyrotechnics simultaneously makes me giggle and annoys me. I push away both emotions in favor of enjoying the show. I have always loved fireworks, ever since I was young and we could see them from my parents' bedroom windows.

“They're so fucking beautiful,” I say, and this solicits no more than a vague murmur of agreement. “And,” I persist, thinking as I speak and wishing that it was easier to share things with him. “They're only this beautiful because they are in motion. Because they're so temporary.”

I feel like I've stumbled onto some profound insight on the human condition, yet the boy beside me barely notices, instead content to know the technical names of the various types of light in the sky, and to correct our neighbor's assessment that the ones spraying sparks lower to the ground are duds. They are, my boyfriend informs him, actually called fountains, and they are done on purpose.

I reflect on the argument/discussion we had before walking over here, the one that we've had too many times to count now, and on that sense of something's missing that's been hovering over me for days. Weeks, if you want to cut the bullshit. And I feel like crying, because I am sitting here, beneath some of the most beautiful things ever created by human beings, and all my boyfriend can say is that they're wired electrically, but that every rocket in them was made by someone, and he is pretty close to being certified for that.

Somehow, the entire thing is summed up in the one accidentally-profound thing he tells me that whole evening.

“Someone in the Pyrotechnics Guild was cremated and put into a firework,” he says at one point. “A willow. The ones you call waterfalls.”

This distracts me, and I turn to look at him, eyes wide. “Really?” I ask.

“Really.”

A pause. Then, “I want to do that. When I die, I want to be something beautiful like that.”

And somehow it hurts when he doesn't say a thing in response, even though there really isn't anything to say to something like that.

I think, It feels like there's an hourglass slung around both of our necks, and the sand in it is slowly running out a hole in its long-broken bottle.

I think. If only I could fix this, and then, on the heels of that, I don't want to fix this. We can't fix this.

I'm not sure which is worse: knowing what you have is broken, or knowing you might not care enough to repair it anymore.