The Geometry of Being Small

When I was seven, my uncle took me to the county fair in a town whose name I have forgotten, but whose noise I can still hear. I remember the way the metal rides groaned against the sky, a rhythmic, mechanical heartbeat that felt like it belonged to a giant. I spent the afternoon staring upward, my neck craned until it ached, trying to map the path of the spinning lights against the darkening blue. Everything felt impossibly tall, a dizzying architecture of steel and colored bulbs that promised a view of the world I wasn’t yet allowed to see. I stood there with a half-eaten candy apple, feeling the vibration of the machinery through the soles of my shoes, convinced that if I just watched long enough, I might finally understand how the earth stayed tethered to the ground. We grow up and learn the physics of these things, the weight and the bolts, but do we ever truly lose that initial, breathless wonder at how something so heavy can dance?

José J. Rivera-Negrón has captured this exact feeling in his photograph titled Summer Magic. It brings back that specific, upward gaze toward the impossible heights of a fairground ride. Does it make you want to climb back up there, just to see the world spin again?