The drive to the lantern festival was two hours, which was the longest I’d been in a car with my boyfriend Drew. My friend Rayce drove, his wife Meghann sat shotgun, and Drew and I were in the back. The road was open but not empty, and the sun was bright but not blinding.
Drew is my first boyfriend, and I’m his first girlfriend. We’ve adopted a posture of figuring things out together, approaching each other with open arms but unsure footing as we navigate a new way of loving someone. Rayce and Meghann have been married for three years, caring for each other with a confidence that can only be fostered over time. In thinking about their relationship, I couldn’t help but hope that Drew and I could make it that long, if not longer.
Halfway through the drive, we pulled off the highway and got Arby’s. Rayce passed our straws back to Drew, who wouldn’t let me grab one from him. As I reached out, he yoinked them back, barely containing his laughter. I laughed as I kept failing, but I wasn’t giving up that easily. Then again, neither was he. Seconds later, we were brawling.
When the cashier came to the window, he asked Rayce, “Do you have a dog back there?”
Rayce sighed and said, “No, they’re just fighting.”
Meghann, Drew, and I cackled as he handed me my straw.
We arrived at the festival, which took place on the Auto City Speedway. Past the gates, hundreds of people sat on a pastel patchwork of picnic blankets, and the smell of pizza drew festival goers to food trucks. On the far end of the track, a local performer sang under a countdown to the lantern release.
Once we got inside, volunteers gave each of us a lantern, which Meghann said represented a wish. As we set up our picnic blankets, I asked Drew what he was going to wish for. He looked at me kindly and said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, “I already have everything I want.”
We stared at our blank canvases until I decided to draw little hearts, an homage to the person beside me and the love we were fostering for each other. I would write, “For positive change and lasting love.”
As soon as I drew my first heart, Drew said, “I’m gonna draw a Goomba.”
I started laughing and told him, “I’m drawing something to show how much I love you. You’re going to draw a Goomba?”
His head bent over his phone screen, which was opened to a Google image search of “Goomba.” He said, “Listen, I’m a simple guy.”
Next to us, Meghann covered her lantern with multicolored, almost impressionistic flowers. Rayce wrote, with perhaps unrealistic expectations of how far these lanterns could fly, “Detroit or bust!”
Night fell, and the concrete walls of the speedway faded into the darkness. Orange light from the countdown spread over the speedway as we waited for the sun to sink below the horizon. Soon enough, the announcer told us that it was time to release the lanterns.
If you didn’t follow every step of the announcer’s instructions, you couldn’t get your lantern to fly, and even if you did, there was a good chance that it would crash into the ground anyway. Drew lit his lantern, and his Goomba shot into the sky. It flew away so quickly that I lost track of it in seconds. Then Drew helped me get mine off the ground. Standing beside me, he guided it upwards with gentle hands until it joined a galaxy of white lights.
Meanwhile, Rayce’s lantern flew six feet before crashing. He watched and said, “Well. So much for Detroit.”
Rayce helped Meghann get hers to fly, but it ended up catching on a raceway sign. They laughed and said that it was okay. Their lanterns flew perfectly for the last two years, so one mishap was fine.
Meanwhile, other people were having trouble with their lanterns. If the lanterns flew sideways, fire caught on the paper bodies. Kids screamed as lanterns fell from the sky, and adults yelled, “Watch out!” before the flaming lanterns crashed into people’s heads (which was more alarming than painful). The street lamps collected low-flyers like trophies. As a sight of heaven flew above the horizon, chaos reigned below.
While we watched the lights, Drew put his arm around me, a weighted comfort on my shoulders. I wrapped my arm around his waist. We kept checking our six to make sure that we didn’t get clocked by what Drew called, “Flying fire,” chuckling every time we did.
I looked up at Drew’s face cast in a flickering orange light. I thought about how to witness something so wonderful is to remember all that the world can be and to experience it with him is to remember how beautiful it is to love someone. Leaning into his warm arms, I said, “I could stay here forever.”
He pulled me closer and said, “Me too.”
Tiffany Kajiwara graduated from Calvin in 2022 with majors in literature and writing. Now, she continues to live in Grand Rapids and works at Baker Academic Publishing as a marketing assistant. In her free time, she enjoys crocheting, thrifting, and psychoanalyzing cartoon characters.
