At home we cook the worlds speediest pasta, running around the kitchen, drinking more. We eat out of the pot to avoid dishes, pile our shit into the car, and I’m buried beneath a huge blanket in the back seat with a baggie of MDMA in my underwear, the music up, it feels like we’re flying through the streets, through the dark, towards Santa Fé. In the distance there are little clumps of light and the faint resonance of bass. We take a sharp right to avoid a police check point and pull off to the side of the road.
The Dragon festival is a sparkling circus, a grotesque city of lost souls and free souls and everything in between. Faces loom in and out of the darkness, costumes and paint, eyeballs wide as plates, I feel safe bundled up in my polar bear hat. People touch my head, growl at me, laughing. We go floating form tent to tent, where I hold my hand against my chest and feel a beat that is my own heart all mixed up with the rhythm of the music, and it’s the same exuberant boom in everyone’s chest, in everyone’s loose limbs. We eat up exhilaration, from plastic bottles, bitter fingertips, through rolled up bills, we become infinite, we share, we sweat, we dance, we hold on, we let go. Faces loom in and out of the darkness, big gaping smiles, a strangeness that feels soft as skin. I feel my body in every place, I feel me, and you in every pore, I feel my soul hum.
We are under a big canopy dancing with our arms up when the sky becomes the faintest purple and the sun begins to roll up, beneath a layer of thick fog. Trash begins to emerge from the mist. We sit in the first weak rays of sunlight and watch as the landscape appears, a strange dystopian shire. The music persists, but we wander away from it, boots kicking up whitish dust. We sit amongst the olive trees and look at our hands and look at the clouds, and watch each others’ eyes expand. All around me is a serious murmur; they talk about growing up, about ideal childhood, about rebellion and drugs, about moderation and excess, about the revolution that must begin with education, but all my words are sealed up inside of me. The sun is up now, Borja falls asleep on his back, I pick little bits of grass and watch the ants scuttle busily across the cracked earth. Matteo says the olive trees look purple, and I curl up against him, curl up inside my hood.
Back at the festival, the dogs have returned to their instinctual selves, roaming in dusty, playful packs. I stop every few feet to say hello to them. There is a droopy faced old bulldog, there is a beautiful white-gray husky mix chained to a van, there is a tiny fluffy German Shepard pup being carried under someone’s arm. We see familiar faces scattered all around, exchange hugs and smiles. At the car we eat orange segments and pass around a big plastic bottle of water. There is a short shirtless man standing alone against a truck across the street from us. He looks a little lost, he keeps looking over in our direction with a vague smile, shuffling his feet. I walk over to him and offer water, and he laughs nervously and gulps it down, grateful. A red car drives past and shouts at me, “¡Oso polar! ¡Súbete al coche fantástico!” They rev their engine. A moped stops in from of me. They like my hat. They flash big golden-toothed smiles at me.
We wander, wander, wander. I talk to a boy with a painted face, to see if he has any paint, but he’s lost it. He’s Lithuanian and has yellow eyes like a lizard. He sits with us and we stare and he says, “Natural, natural,” and follows us until he comes across a shirtless man throwing himself around in the street and the Lithuanian lances himself with a gleeful whoop and they begin flipping and leaping and tossing each other to the music. We find Adri, still dancing, shirtless, furious, ecstatic. I’m covered in red paint, all down my right arm and my t-shirt and my sweatshirt. We wander and wander.
Eventually, we are hot and Borja is wilting, so we pile into the car, up to our necks in sweatshirts and blankets and we cruise home, a little anxiously. It’s strange to watch people, walking along the streets, their clothes bare of dust and paint, their faces void of wonder, their destinations somehow certain. Outside the house, I’m unloading beer from the trunk, stained and dusty, still wrapped in my polar bear hat, and a neighbor passes by, a middle aged man in a button down shirt, and he seems like some strange surreal portrait of normality, of the bland nature of reality. In the house, we curl up on the couches, and giggle vacantly at Charlie, delirious and exhausted, but humming with left over adrenaline. We take lazy showers and eat slowly with chopsticks, just because. Over thirty six hours pass without sleep, and when I finally go to bed, it’s because I no longer want to keep my eyes open.
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