The invitations arrived two days earlier.
A friend of a friend had invited us onto a yacht off the Amalfi Coast. There would be dinner. Music. Fireworks after sunset. I almost declined.
There is something about celebrations that can make you feel like an observer if they do not belong to your own history.
Italy has its own holidays. France has hers. America has hers. We inherit different stories depending on where we are born, as if the world quietly hands each of us a different book and asks us to memorize the pages.
But the sea has never cared about passports.
Neither has the sky.
As darkness settled over the water, someone lit the first sparkler. A child laughed somewhere behind me. Glasses touched. Music drifted across the deck, carried away by the breeze almost as quickly as it arrived.
Then the first firework bloomed above the coastline.
The phones came first, of course.
They always do now.
We have become afraid that beauty might vanish before we can prove we witnessed it.
But after the first explosion in the sky, something changed.
The screens lowered.
Faces lifted.
Hundreds of strangers were no longer recording the night.
They were inside it.
I wondered if that was why fireworks have survived for so long. Not because they are loud or beautiful, but because for a few brief seconds they remind us that there are still moments too large to fit inside a screen.
Sometimes I think the world asks too much of us.
Choose a side.
Choose a country.
Choose an opinion.
Defend it.
Repeat it.
Yet standing on that yacht, surrounded by people who had grown up speaking different languages and living different lives, none of those things seemed particularly important.
The fireworks were celebrating one nation’s story.
The wonder belonged to everyone.
I thought about my father.
He loved looking at the stars. When I was little he used to tell me that light was patient. Some of the stars we admired had already disappeared long before their light reached us.
Perhaps people are like that too.
The kindness we offer today may arrive in someone else’s life years from now.
The encouragement we give.
The forgiveness.
The laughter.
None of it is ever truly wasted.
Another firework burst above the water.
Gold this time.
Its reflection scattered across the sea until the waves carried it away.
It reminded me that beauty has never asked permission to cross borders.
Neither has hope.
By the end of the evening, the sparklers had burned down to their final embers. The music had softened. Conversations became quieter, as though no one wanted to be the first person to admit the night was ending.
I stood at the edge of the yacht for another minute before we returned to shore.
The fireworks were over.
The stars remained.
And somehow that felt like the better ending.
Because celebrations belong to moments.
The sky belongs to all of us.
For more of the Amalfi Coast, click here.
V.
