You’ll have your knees pinned on somebody’s shoulders, sloppy punches raining down, when fire fills your eyes. Everything started because some kids were blocking the exit of the place that serves booze in teapots until the sun comes up. As you left, you pushed through them and got mouthy because that’s how people are at 4 am. One of them said something back because that’s also how people are at 4 am, so your friend responded, and things escalated until another friend of yours yelled the address for his hip-hop website—dot com and all—as he threw a punch and bodies drunkenly erupted into each other. Now choking, coughing, and barely able to see the people scattering around you, you blindly stagger down the alleyway across the street and stumble into your building, slamming diagonally from wall to wall as you make your way up the stairwell. When you fall through your apartment door and onto your back, your hoarse laughter will interrupt your roommate and his girlfriend as they do lines and watch Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves of all things. You’ll rip your clothes off and get in the shower, yelling “the motherfuckers got me” over and over, eyes as wide as you can make them through your burning, swollen face—laughing, crying, spitting into the showerhead.

You’ll have just watched somebody smash a Bank of America sign when you think about how there used to be a punk club down the block. There will be something poetic in watching the suburban bros and college students the neighborhood, and really the city, now caters to destroying it because of a baseball game. Your gaze will linger on a burning garbage can right before the crowd starts to flee. When the air grows acrid with chemicals, you’ll run, too. You’ll later find out that someone threw a bottle, and it smashed in the street, which scared a horse, which scared the cop riding it, so the cop did what cops do when they’re afraid or otherwise emotional and started firing away. The projectiles were “less lethal,” but the thing is, if you spray a crowd with objects moving hundreds of feet per second someone might get hit in the eye and die. The news will call it an unfortunate accident and mostly blame the crowd, but really the people who are supposedly there to keep the peace and who are given weapons and everything shouldn’t panic and get violent just because some things are being broken. If things being broken was a good enough reason for violence, this whole place would be a bloodbath.

You’ll be sitting between train cars when your camera clangs down the steps and into a rice paddy. You’ll think about the newly lost things you’ll never be able to show people now, then get more practical and think about what you can go without over the next month so you can afford to buy a new camera. After a few minutes, you’ll go inside and sit, your head rattling against a half-open window, the wind soothing you, until you notice the smell. People will start coughing, looking around, beginning to panic. After a few minutes the train will screech to a stop. Not long after, soldiers will start walking down the aisles, nostrils flared, yelling, trying to find the source. There were bombs in the capital recently and things are still tense. You’ll search your pocket for the metal canister your friend gave you for self-defense when he said your route might get a little rough, but it won’t be there, and you’ll realize that you’ve accidentally set off a chemical agent on a crowded train at a time when people are doing things like that on purpose. As you mentally prepare to be taken off the train, probably arrested, and who knows what else, it starts to move again. A soldier walks by, shaking his head and shrugging at a colleague before jamming the scraped-up metal canister into his pocket.

You’ll finally make it out of the park and into the street when a police cruiser floors it through the crowd. The march was peaceful for hours but when night fell, the police asserted themselves. Spotlights came down from helicopters, batons glistening in their beams. The cops pushed you in one direction then another, then threatened you for not moving fast enough in an entirely new one. Something will smash in the distance and the first whiffs of pepper spray fill the air. When the car accelerates, you’ll pin your girlfriend against a wrought iron fence, making a frame around her as best you can while the crowd crushes into you. You’ll be amazed when the aftermath leaves only confusion and anger rather than bodies. This will be called the beginning of a riot. You’ll think about how you thought somebody you loved might get hurt for just a few moments and how angry and helpless it made you feel. How you wanted to rip the car to pieces until it was nothing but screws, scrap metal, and fluid stains on the pavement. You’ll think about what it would be like if people made it so you always had to feel that way, that if ending that means things have to get smashed or cars need to be ripped apart or buildings or whatever else have to be broken down into an unrecognizable nothing, then rubble should decorate the streets.