The Fourth was loud this year, the way it's loud every year, and I spent it indoors with a cat who had concluded the world was ending.
She goes under the bed around dusk on the third, sometimes, when the early enthusiasts start, and she stays there through the fourth and into the fifth, emerging only to confirm that I haven't left and the booming hasn't followed her under there. I lie on the floor and put my hand under and she presses her head against it, furious, as if I personally arranged the fireworks to ruin her summer.
I didn't go anywhere. There was a thing I could have gone to, a friend's roof with a view of the big display downtown, and I thought about it for roughly the length of time it takes to decline an invitation kindly in your head, and then I stayed home.
From here you don't see the fireworks. You hear them, and you catch the light of them sometimes on the ceiling, a pink or green flare gone before you've turned to look. I had the windows open and the lamp on and a book I wasn't really reading, and the whole city going off around me like a long argument I wasn't part of.
I want to be honest about the feeling, because there's a smugness in it I don't entirely trust. Sitting home while everyone else is out being festive, it's easy to decide you're the wise one, the one who sees through it, too sensitive and discerning for a crowd and a paper plate. That's a flattering story and I don't think it's quite true. Some of why I stayed in is just that crowds tire me and the cat needed a hand under the bed. Wisdom doesn't come into it. It's temperament dressed up as a choice.
But I'll keep the smaller version of the feeling, the one without the superiority. I liked being home. I liked the booms at a distance and the green light on the ceiling and not having to make conversation while I watched. I liked knowing exactly where I was while the city threw itself a party I could hear but didn't have to attend.
The cat came out around one, when it had been quiet a while, and walked across me with the particular contempt of someone who has survived a thing you failed to take seriously. We agreed, in our way, that we'd both done the holiday correctly. Then she went to sleep on my legs and left me to turn the lamp off myself.