fall fireworks

It's mid-November and I hear fireworks, a ton of them, invisible but echoing in the night. Either that or something terrible. Explosions that wouldn't be art. Our art is made from explosions. I always at least slightly fear the outside world, and simultaneously resist that fear, resent it as a signifier of being on the losing side of a culture war where this world works against me, not for me, except of course for the ways I don't realize, forever taking them for granted. My fear has been enforced by unwelcome intruders in my bodily space, places I didn't know how to feel until they felt pain and then later I began to like it because I had learned to live with it. I imagine people who live in this world without a foundation of pain, who walk alone without being afraid, who feel this world exists for them. I am occasionally told they exist but since they're not me, I can only approximate a philosophical straw man. The opposite could be true-- a foundation of fear and pain and ego and mortality may be universal. Could be the only things that we have in common as humans. I imagine it's a fluid, fluctuating value between those all or nothing absolutes.