Writing this from Brighton seafront while fireworks explode overhead. The crowd cheers, thousands of lights bloom against the dark sky, and I can’t shake this thought: what if someone’s memory is being erased right now?
Guy Fawkes Night always felt different here. Back home, November 5th was just another date. But standing among strangers watching controlled explosions, feeling the collective rush of celebration, there’s something unsettling about it all.
Everyone remembers the rhyme. Remember, remember the fifth of November. But what if we couldn’t? What if those bursts of light did more than illuminate the sky?
I’ve been wrestling with this idea for months now while working on my next novel. Memory as a weapon. History as something malleable. The way societies choose what to commemorate and what to forget.
Tonight, watching faces lit by fire, I wonder how many personal histories could vanish in plain sight. How many individual stories get lost when we’re all looking up at the same spectacle.
The sea behind me is black glass reflecting orange sparks. The crowd moves like one organism, responding to each explosion with gasps and applause. Beautiful and terrifying at once.
This energy, this collective forgetting of everything except the moment… it’s going straight into the manuscript. Sometimes you need to stand in the center of something to understand its power.
The fireworks are ending now. People drift away, already forgetting the exact sequence of colors, the precise moment when the biggest rocket bloomed. Memory fades so easily when we’re not paying attention.
Maybe that’s the real conspiracy. Not what they make us remember, but what we choose to forget.
Daria Ryzhikova Writer