You like to think of it like lessons, only they’re the ones that never stick. You’d like to think that you know enough to know better, or at least enough to know when to brace for the blow. You hate to be the sort for burst bubbles, but you’re not the sort to keep it to white whales. It’s all rockets red glare and blossoms made of phosphorus. It’s the racket and the rattle and the tremble of the beasts curled beside you. Sore from the speech, sore from the symbols, the glow and the glare and the sounds of glass in thumping repetition. The press of breath, a fog of condensation, winter reaching its busy fingers through wall and window. There’s one point, and no one ever stops making it.
It’s a dirty deal from an old gimmicked deck, a timeless patter that you’ll laugh off later but you fall for every time they work it right. It doesn’t help that you can see it coming. It doesn’t help that you can tell us how it’s done. The language is the misdirect, it’s the visitor in the smoke and mirrors, that trick of the light that tells us what to see. It’s a hard rote ritual, the sort of etiquette that teaches you what the magic means. It wears a thousand masks and bears a thousand names, and it loses its way in the story and the reasons, but it really can stick a landing.
It’s car alarms and small arms fire and yet another year is upon you, as if anybody asked. The cacophony is profoundly ubiquitous, all yawps and yowls and hoots and howls, unsustainable yodels and ill considered gritos sounding out all at once. Like a paratrooper, you’re always surrounded. There’s always explosions to spare, the streets strung with smoke and refuse, the rituals ongoing and often perpetuated loosely and with varying degrees of vigor. Some clock, some calendar, something to shoot for on down the road. Another season out to sea, another day more and less.