Her lungs were burning. Her feet felt like they could give away at any moment. Yet she ran. Behind the deceptively white bus with the mocking blinking sign promising a ride to her destination, she ran as if her life depended on it. And it did. She wanted to go see the fireworks so bad. It would make her heart break if she couldn’t make it in time for the New Year’s Eve fireworks show on the waterfront. At a time when life seemed to be in a perpetual state of disappointment, she couldn’t afford to miss this bus.

Not if she wanted to retain her sanity. So she ran. Almost there! She could feel her fingertips almost touching the handle of the bus, only a few inches separating the two. But her legs gave away, and she collapsed on the side of the road from exhaustion. The tail end of the bus wobbled as it turned a corner, wagging tauntingly at her. Failure, her old friend, pulled her into yet another unwanted embrace.

The headlights and her tears produced a kaleidoscope of lights that blurred her vision. Sitting on a desolate sidewalk, it gave her a curious sense solace to see that her bitterness and frustrations transform the daily lights of the city into a surreal light show. Watching the spots of light bob up and down and disappear for a moment with a blink, she remembered getting laid off from work right before the holiday season.

The hurtful words which dissolved the small amount of confidence she had acquired at work engulfed her, along with the hustle-bustle of the city. The futility of sitting on a pavement weeping annoyed her. She berated herself: What would it achieve? None of the living or non-living objects that passed by cared about her existence. To them, she was just another element of the scene, of no consequence whatsoever. It was such a good metaphor for her life that she almost smiled.

Who would blame these strangers for their apathy to her existence, when the people in her life couldn’t care less either? An absent family, a group of friends to whom she only acts as a sounding board for their problems and the ever-present pressure of finding “the one” while she remains painfully single- the list went on. Her tears got more and more bitter. Pretty soon, all the disappointments and resentments she cried formed a dark puddle around her, so dark it wouldn’t even reflect the bright holiday decorations that shone overhead. She was consumed in the darkness, and not even a flicker of light could enter her.

A nearby clock tower rang in the evening. Suddenly, she felt the rush of traffic around her increased. People became more agitated, their paces sped up. The collective heat from the resulting friction, together with the subtle change in the energy around her made her little puddle of darkness to evaporate. All around her, there was now a dark mist, but thanks to the chemical nature of vapors, light started to crack in through the black clouds. With the second dong of the bell came a great gust of the wind, blowing away the encroaching mist of darkness, which was starting to settle down around her again.

Suddenly, she was exposed to bright lights again. The third time the bell rang; she felt the sound waves energize every cell of her body. It changed the world around her. The sidewalks became her ramp, the streetlamps her spotlights. In a daze, she stood up. She needed to get to the waterfront before the clock tower stopped ringing before the fireworks went off. She started running again but this time, the sidewalks led her in the right direction. The traffic magically parted as she ran across the road. The wind in her hair pushed her towards her destination. All the cafes she ran past played her favorite songs.

“Lights will guide you home…” her heart sang, as the familiar sense of breathlessness took her over. She turned a corner as the last dong went off, but the waterfront was still at the end of the road. A sinking feeling started setting in, but she shook it off and kept on running. At almost the same moment she caught her first glimpse of the huge crowd gathered at the waterfront, she heard the first firework go off. A glimpse of the glittering tail of a firework doubled her speed and in a jump through time and space that would defy fiction, she arrived at the waterfront thronged with people.

But she couldn’t care less, for in front of her eyes was her reward: a brilliant display of fireworks. The deafening sound they gave off almost shook the ground and as each of them set off; she could feel part of their energy seeping into her. As the dazzling lights in the sky reflected in her dark eyes, the flecks of fire burned away the hopelessness and bitterness. To quote a YA novel she recently read, at that moment, she felt infinite.

The wind was blowing her hair into a mess as she sat near the waterfront, staring at the water. The show had ended and the crowd had dispersed. But it seemed to her that somehow, the water had preserved the curious energy of the fireworks through their reflections. Even in the biting cold, she felt a beautiful warmth spread inside her. As long as the river flowed, and the fireworks glowed, what could bring her down?

Nothing.