Life is some sort of coming softly. Not abruptly, but in the smallest changes which you hardly perceive. A word spoken too quietly, a laugh that goes on too long, the manner in which somebody looks at you and you know, for just a moment, that there is more to the world than you ever thought in your own mind.

Ethan does not see this yet. He wanders through school believing that everything is just about survival, about jokes that do or do not work, about falling over the little things, which are so small and are not perceivable. He will discover, gradually but surely, that even the banal is weighty. That failures are not only mistakes. Defense and defence can be the same thing, laughter. The fact that there are those who walk out, and those who are staying behind and those who simply do not ever look at you are all shaping you in a way that you can never quantify.

You will have acquaintances, and competitors and people you scarcely know who teach. You will see Ethan trip, gawk, fall and stand and occasionally, take pleasure where he never imagined. You will learn to embrace the power of tiny details and how deafeningly they may come at a time when you are not paying attention.

It is not a story of perfection. It is about noticing. Regarding the need to pay attention to the messy, beautiful, disjointed life that demands that you see, feel, and hold to it, even when it is not entirely known why. The life which is laughing at you, laughing with you, and sometimes just sitting and watching how you can work it out.

You can probably find steps of yours here. Not with such sweeps, not with such a twist, but with bits of stuff, with the little, the ignored, the seconds which bring impressions long after they are gone.

For life is not fireworks, like this story. It is sparks. Little, silent, unseen sparks that hover had you, technically, only to observe.