MYTH [P2]

It’s funny how memories are so much more vivid if you were happy at the time rather than sad or angry. Maybe it’s because we are usually sad or angry, or at least not happy, and the change really stays in your mind. It’s surprising how we don’t really feel happy most of the time with all the wonders going on in the world. Sure, there’s crime, violence, murder, hunger, and war, which makes it easy to forget all the good things in life. But if you spend your time dwelling on them, you’ll never live past them, and you’ll never get to really enjoy how it feels to sit by the ocean on a lazy Sunday afternoon with a crisp, salty breeze teasing your hair, or how the fragrance of rogue roses dances across the tip or your nose alongside the stained gray bricks of scholarly, ancient, elegant and beautiful buildings, or taste the crackled, hot air of sand dunes worming its way in-between every fiber of your clothes. That’s one of my fondest childhood memories, and I always look back on it with a smile on my face. Every single summer my parents would take the three of us, my brothers Alonso and Sergio, and myself up to a small town in Mexico called Cielos De Arena. Cielos De Arena was the Atlantis of the desert: a long forgotten city sunken in waves of rolling yellow sand dunes sculpted by dry winds that whistled through dun-bricked buildings all year long. There were only a few hundred people in the town; every single one of them had lived there for years and years, which is the only reason why they would stay there. The moment our family car, once red but now had chipped so much it looked blue, stopped within the city limits, the three of us would burst out of the car as if there was a dangerous amount of energy from being caged in the metal prison on wheels for so long.

I was the youngest member of our tribe by three years. Before me was Alonso, and then Sergio who had two years on Alonso. Sergio served as a sort of ringleader for the three of us, and steered us in the right direction to get the most chaos and excitement out of every adventure. The one adventure that was always definite to happen, of course, was the Cielos De Arena trip every summer. We stayed at a shambling, dusty house that looked to be built by a madman and decorated by someone who was blind, wooden tables, motel furniture and plastic stools were cobbled together in a bizarre patchwork of furniture. The house was built by my dad back when he was a teenager, a story he told us many, many times before we went to bed. We still came back to that house every year to ride in my dad’s jeep that he kept in Cielos De Arena year-round. When we were all sticky-fingered children, he would drive us around on the dunes, but when Sergio turned 12, my dad taught him how to drive. That’s really when all the memories start becoming a lot clearer.

I can still vividly recall every detail: the sky was always such a crisp, bright blue like someone had just washed candy over our heads. The sun was much too hot and would burn up any wispy white strands that had stretched across the sky early in the morning. Sergio drove the jeep in an angular fashion, always making sure the tires never ran over their own tracks, as he always made a point to never look back at the same place the same way. As we climbed our way up mountains of sand he would yank the jeep in a sharp point, spraying a coarse, burning mist in a plume up behind Alonso and I barely sitting in the back holding on for our lives and screaming with excitement the entire time. Then Sergio would slow down dramatically along the ridge of the dunes, teetering over one side to the other. Alonso would scream, “To the left, Sergio! The left!” To which I would yell back, “No, no! To the other left!” because I didn’t know my lefts and rights but I sure as hell didn’t want to go the way Alonso wanted to go.

When he was a little older, around 15, we were all out tearing up the desert with our reckless fun when once Sergio decided to do something different. When Alonso and I began to squeal louder than piglets, as we always did, he began to smoothly drift back to the peak of the dune. He then almost came to a stop, slowly turning a full circle until we were perfect to one side of the dune, the windshield blinded by blue as if someone had thrown a bucket of paint over the glass. At this point I was terrified because I could no longer see the ground with only bottomless blue beyond filling my eyes, “Sergio, are you crazy?! We have to go back down, it’s not safe!” I cried in a whiney, high-pitched yelp. Sergio then turned around to look at me over his shoulder, “Myth, if you always did safe things you’d never have any fun!”

Then he turned back around and plummeted at full speed down the side of the dune, hurling Alonso and I forward to the back of Sergio’s seat, who at this point was howling with laughter like a lunatic. My stomach was in my throat as my fatty toes desperately gripping at the floor of the violently shaking jeep. But as we plummeted down the side of the dune, I suddenly came to realize that Sergio was right. If you never took the time to enjoy things while they happened, safe or not, you wouldn’t really get the full effect of joy. I felt myself release my death grip on the bar lining the seats and let myself because nothing more but an object of the elements, crashing wildly into everything in the back of the car and laughing as hard as I could the whole time. When we returned that afternoon at sunset, the sky was painted pink, orange and yellow, turning the sand red in the rolling walls that surrounded us. Together we all ate food my mother had spent all afternoon on stone benches outside. We sat in a ring around a large fire pit, my dad telling us stories that we had heard over and over again under the sprawling, cool night sky, smoke from the fire nuzzling into our clothes and nipping at our noses. With each word my dad said, a different star hung over us twinkled just a bit brighter than it had before.