The sky lights up with a burst of blue. I drive home knowing I don’t want to go back to my apartment with my boyfriend. As another explosion breaks through the sky, I know that my heart doesn’t lie with him anymore.

I’m reminded that once, on a special night, the firework beat echoed in my heart so hard, it transformed me.

In the first ever week of my recurring tenure at a summer camp, Wednesday was movie night and Independence Day. We walked out of the concrete theater, having finished a ridiculous Transformers movie, and I heard, Kaboom. Push. A firework shot into the air.

A young man stood to my left. His head nodded as he watched the colors flicker above. Green sparkles outlined him, deepening his already beautiful shape. An intense ache howled through me, gluing my eyes to him. I thought I’d known what a crush was until that moment, but there, a wind tunnel of love crushed me so hard I could barely breathe. 

 That was my first taste of what love might be, of that glow, or what I thought it was, or at least, the kind of love that mixes idealism with loving someone I didn’t choose to, but who love chose for me. 

As I drive home, I feel like my own life explodes as I experience, again, a love I would not have chosen, at least in the state of my relationship.

I ask, myself, and the fireworks, “Do I leave? Do I stay? Do I try to fix all of my boyfriend and my issues?”

But their only answer is, as always, Kaboom. Push.