“Because learning how to make tortillas takes patience.”
“Are you saying I’m not patient?”
“I’m saying what I’m saying.”
“You keep talking like that and you’re going to have to kiss me again.”
“Patience, my good man, patience.” We joked around all the way to White Sands. Being with Dante made me playful. And for some reason, we were both really hungry. By the time we got to White Sands, we’d eaten three burritos apiece. And we were still hungry.
Thirty-Five
THE SECOND I PARKED THE truck at the foot of a large gypsum dune, Dante swung open the door and made a dash for the ocean of white sand that stood before us. “Ari! This is amazing! It’s fucking amazing!” Off went his shirt as he climbed to the top of the dune. “Oh my God!” I loved watching him, Dante uncensored, Dante unafraid to act like a little kid, Dante unafraid to act like a dork, unafraid to be himself, unafraid to be a part of everything around him. I watched as he spun himself and stretched out his arms. He would’ve taken in the entire landscape and held it in his arms if that had been possible. “Ari! Ari! Look! It goes on forever!”
I took off my shirt and grabbed the sunscreen from the glove compartment. I took my time climbing up the dune. The feel of the sand underneath my feet was soft and cool, the harsh elements unable to steal away the leftover innocence of the earth. I remembered the first time my mom and dad had brought me here. My sisters had buried me in the sand, and I’d held my mom’s hand as we watched the sunset. We’d stayed for some night program, and I remembered my dad carrying me on his shoulders as we made our way to the car. “Ari? Are you in your head again?”
“Sorry.”
“What were you thinking about?”
“You.”
“Liar.”
“You got me. I was thinking about the first time I came here with my mom and dad and my sisters. I must have been five years old.”
Dante took the sunscreen from my hand and I felt the cool of the sunscreen and his hand on my back and my shoulders. I thought of the day he’d washed me with a sponge after the accident and the tears on his face and how I hated him because I should have been the one with tears on his face. His tears had said You saved my life, Ari, and I didn’t want to think about that. I thought I hated him then without knowing why, and how impossible he had been to hate—especially because I loved him so much without even knowing it. “Turn around,” he said—and I did as I was told. He rubbed the sunscreen into my chest and shoulders and stomach—and I laughed because it sort of tickled. “I love you, Aristotle Mendoza,” he whispered.
I didn’t say anything. I just looked into his clear brown eyes, and I guess I was smiling, because he said, “Killer smile.” He handed me the sunscreen. As I rubbed the sunscreen on his chest and arms and back, all I could think of was how perfect he was, his swimmer’s body, his skin. As we stood there, I felt my heart beating as if it wanted to jump out of my chest and leap into his and stay there forever.
“What are you thinking, Ari? Tell me.”
“I’m thinking that if I died right now it would be okay with me.”
“Nobody’s ever said anything like that to me before. It’s a lovely thing to say. Truly it is. Except it wouldn’t be okay with me if we died right here and now.”
“Why not?”
“Because you haven’t made love to me yet.”
That made me smile. That really made me smile.
* * *
“Did you know this used to be an ocean? Imagine all that water.”
“I could have taught you to swim in that ocean.”
“And you could have taught me to dive into those waters.”
He nodded and smiled.
“On the other hand,” I said, “we might have drowned in those waters.”
“Really? Did you have to go there?” He took my hand.
We walked into the forever white sand dunes, and soon we were far away from all the people in the world. Everyone had disappeared from the universe except the young man whose hand I was holding, and everything that had ever been born and everything that had ever died existed where his hand touched mine. Everything—the blue of the sky, the rain in the clouds, the white of the sand, the water in the oceans, all the languages of all the nations, and all the broken hearts that had learned to beat in their brokenness.
We didn’t talk. This was the quietest moment I had ever been in. Even my busy brain—it was quiet. So quiet that I felt that I was in a church. And the thought entered my head that my love for Dante was holy, not because I was holy but because what I felt for him was pure.
No, we didn’t talk. We didn’t need to talk. Because we were discovering that the heart could make music. And we were listening to the music of the heart. We watched the lightning in the distance and heard the echo of the thunder. Dante leaned into me—and then I kissed him. He tasted of sweat and the hint of my mother’s burritos. Time didn’t exist, and whatever the world thought of us, we didn’t live in anybody’s world but our own at that very moment.
It seemed that we had actually become cartographers of a new world, had mapped out a country of our own, and it was ours and only ours, and though we both knew that country would disappear, almost as soon as it had appeared, we had full citizenship in that country and we were free to love each other. Ari loved Dante. Dante loved Ari.
I didn’t feel lost as I kissed Dante. Not lost at all. I had found where I belonged.
Living in the Land of What Matters
There’s a voice in the universe that holds the truth of all those who walk the earth. I believe that we are born for reasons we do not understand—and it is up to us to discover those reasons. That is your only task. If you are brave enough to sit and listen to the voice of the universe in the silence that lives within you, then you will always know what matters—and you will know too that you matter more to the universe than you will ever know.
One
THE COLOR OF THE EARTH changes with the light. My father’s voice in my head. The light in the desert was so different from the light in the mountains that sifted its way through the trees. The slant of light made everything seem pure and untouched and soft. The light in the desert was harsh, and nothing in it was soft—everything was hard because everything had to be hard if it wanted to live. Maybe that’s why I was hard—because I was like the desert I loved, and Dante wasn’t hard because he came from a softer place, where there was water and tender leaves that filtered the light just enough to keep your heart from becoming a stone.
“How many miles have we traveled?”
I smiled. “Is that your version of Are we there yet?”
Dante shot me one of those I’m not going to roll my eyes looks.
“A little over eighty miles. I’d say we’re about twenty-five miles or so till we get to a camping spot.”
“Camp. Do you know origins of that word?”
“Why do you like to know where words come from?”
“I don’t know. I fell in love with dictionaries when I was six. My mom thought it might be a better idea if I played with my Legos. But, somehow, my parents knew I didn’t really like toys. So they stopped trying to turn me into someone I wasn’t.”