Promise

 Yet another entry to Trifecta's writing challenge.  This week, it was to work in the third definition of "Fireworks:"

3. plural a: a display of temper or intense conflict b: a spectacular display "the fireworks of autumn leaves."

He was promised fireworks.  From the time he was young, he was told he could do anything; be anything.  He was led to believe that he would find something in his life, and that it would ignite his soul, light up his mind with brilliant flashes of insight, blooms of white-hot intensity that would burn out only as the next one exploded in a dazzling new design. 

Instead, he wandered listlessly from event to event, each one either fizzling in acrid smokiness, choking off further interest, or thudding to the ground, an inert mass of unexploded potential.  Oh, there were sparks, to be sure; small ones that held the promise of future spectacular displays of emotionally and intellectually satisfying pyrotechnics.  But each time, as he stood, waiting for the finale, his mind’s sky remained dark, void of the blasts of joy and fulfillment that seemed to light up others’ psyches. 

Eventually, he decided to stop expecting them, to keep his eyes focused on the ground immediately in front of him, to avoid stumbling over the flotsam life inevitably leaves in everyone’s path.  Every once in a while, though, he’d catch himself, head tilted back, scanning the darkness above for a glimmer of what he’d once thought was going to be his life’s illumination.

It was during one of these episodes, in the midst of a berating from his own ego for being so careless, that another thought occurred to him.  Maybe it wasn’t the components of the putative explosives that were to blame.  Conceivably, the external sources of his mental missiles were not the problem. In short,  perhaps the fault was not in the starbursts, but in himself.