Above: A picture from the Lantern Fest. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a camera on me, so I had to resort to my phone.

Yesterday my roommate and I volunteered at the Lantern Fest, which was happening in a nearby town on a racetrack.

Knowing nothing about it, I pictured something like what happened in Tangled (minus the water and boats). Obviously I wasn’t the only one who thought about this because there were a few little girls dressed up as Rapunzel. However, what happened that night was more magical than I could have ever imagined.

Long before the sun went down, I started my volunteering hours by placing marshmallows in s’mores kits for all the participants. I ended up packing up these boxes for five hours with only a couple short breaks interspersed. Maybe on a different day, I would have become bored and irritated with my work, but as it was, I was enjoying the company of total strangers who had decided to come help out for various reasons.

At seven, my roommate joined me on a journey to put things in my car. We had plans to go back, but the front seats of the car were too much of a temptation for our tired legs and feet. We then watched the lanterns getting lit and then let go from a wall nearby.

I can’t describe the feeling that I got when a plethora of lanterns started rising into the sky. It was beautiful. It was awe-some. It was absolutely magical.

Lanterns rising.

My roommate and I walked around the racetrack, watching in awe as lanterns were let go all around us.  The lanterns on the ground were like huge bishop hats, but in the sky they were stars. Our very own close constellation.

I felt euphoric, but I know not everybody was. At one point, it was announced that a six year old girl was missing and her parents were waiting for her at the stage. I felt the little girl’s terror as she was separated from her parents, having been lost in a store when I was that age. I couldn’t quite feel the terror of the parents because I haven’t been a parent yet. But I did imagine the girl finding her way into her mother’s arms, her mother bringing her back to their families’ fire, and her father lighting the lantern with a tiki torch, saying, “Everything’s fine now, sweetie.”