Lights disappeared, music shut off, the crowd, high into the 6 figures in dense clusters, abated their noise. The skyline sat there in an all-too-eerie calm before the proverbial storm. We knew it was coming; heck, we had waited anxiously for the arrival for sheer hours. And the halting silence we had waited for still caught us by surprise.
And then the sky erupted. Effulgent bursts of fire, soaring over the skyline, hit a nonexistent wall in the sky, and with the percussion of archaic war, seemed to shatter midair, incandescent spheres ablaze, shifting before our collective gazes.
Phosphorescent over us, the explosions brightened, increased in frequency, shapeshifted and masqueraded in front of us, cascading above and below and in front and behind us so that the remnant clouds of smoke blocked the lights of the city, gasping for attention. Smoke clouds gleamed neon green, an amazing side effect of the buildings' laser show happening in its midst, battling for real estate in the sky and the attention of our eyes. And, with a tremendous crescendo, ebullient waves upon waves of color fled the scene, gracefully arching over the harbor, meshing the experience into the fullest sensual overload. We were overwhelmed, we were awe-inspired, we were without words to describe anything close to the obscenely luminous, all-too-intense, yet wrenchingly beautiful explosions around us, only able to stammer one thought.
"Wow."
And with a last gasp, the spectacle ceased, leaving the skyline in a haze. Then, for the first time in twenty minutes, we blinked, we exhaled, and we smiled.
Luckily, I also held up my cell phone during the experience, so you can get the slightest sampling of the world I could never create that danced in front of me. Again, excuse the horrid pixelation.
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