One of the most important parts of my childhood

When I was 3 years old I went to live with my parents to Chiquimula, a department at the west of our country known as “La Perla de Oriente.” Since I was little I get used to live in a different place very quickly. This place was very different from the other places where I had live, it wasn’t the city. Not many cars were out there, instead a lot of people had motorcycles and others just walked. The town wasn’t that big and you get to know almost everyone there. The weather, I think that was what I really hated sometimes, we get to be almost 39° and it was really exhausting because when you are a kid you love playing and playing under the sun with that temperature is very uncomfortable. I used to take 3 showers a day, but sometimes the temperature was so hot that I could take even 5 showers, showers with cold water and even it was “cold” I felt it warm. Breathing was also a problem sometimes because when you breathe warm air you feel you are missing oxygen in your lungs so it felt pretty disgusting. People is very gently and polite, they try to be nice with everyone. My house was this yellow, big house near school. 

When I first saw it I thought “This is a mansion! I live in a mansion!” of course I was a little three year old girl and for me it was really huge, but it wasn’t that big. It had a back gate and part of the front yard could be seen through the railing; there was a fountain in the front yard, I used to play there with my brother when we couldn’t go to the pool that was at the back of the house, I remember the pool was squared and light blue. 

The best part of the house was that my bedroom was connected to the back yard and I could go easily to the pool and also I could jump from my window and get in the pool! That was amazing! When I first get to school I was afraid because I knew just 1 girl and 1 boy and I never thought they will be my classmates, well only the girl, her name is Maria Elvira now she is 14 years old and we haven’t talk for a long time, 6 years now. Living there was really incredible, I could walk from home to my dad’s work,  well when I was little I couldn’t go alone but when I grew up I used to walk alone.

I have few clear memories from the year I live there, I remember more things from when I went on vacations years after but one thing I won’t forget is when one afternoon I came back from school with my daddy and we take lunch together and I loved being with him in the afternoon at work but that day he didn’t took me with him so I was really angry and sad and I was crying and kicking the gate until I couldn’t kick it anymore and I fell asleep. Like an hour later my mom took me with my dad and the first thing I said was “don’t you even think about punishing me because is your responsibility to take me with you” both my mom and my dad couldn’t stop laughing of what I had said. Then he told me that kicking the gate was not a solution and that he understand I was mad and sad but that I should called him instead of doing annoying things. Since that day my dad keeps joking with my funny quote. 

Maybe this is not about one specific event, but it´s about one special time in my life, one of the last years I could be with my daddy everyday and spend lots of times with him because after that year he kept traveling from home t work every week and he would stay at home only weekends. I really missed those times, maybe is what I must miss from my childhood.

Those jealous clouds!

Cloudy, grey, cold, what a day. When the weather is like this I feel sleepy and bored. Nothing can make me happy, and I hate it because I want to sleep all day and at school that’s impossible. I’m not sure if weather should be an influence in your way of being but it is for me. I love clouds and sometimes I love it when it’s cold, but they both together, well, they don’t work for me.

How do I really feel? Well, I feel awkward when the weather becomes like this, and sky turns gray because I just feel without energy, sleepy, angry, completely bored and well for me that’s very uncomfortable because I like being happy and active. Also I feel kind of depressed and it’s awful feeling like this because then I start remembering ugly things of my past, sad things, and sometimes stress becomes part of that feeling I get. I hate it when you look at the sky and it looks like telling you I think it might rain but I'm not sure about it and at the end it hardly rains. I prefer when it’s cloudy but at the same time the sun is shining, birds sing, and fresh air can be feel. Maybe is the energy, maybe is just the sky’s color, or it might just be something in me but the cloudy days change completely my way of acting, my way of feeling, my way of speaking, and sometimes I feel like it also changes my way of looking! Well, that might be just my tired eyes that make me look different but anyways I really feel different.

Clouds come, and they stay there, but they are boring, big, grey clouds, they have no shapes, and you can hardly realize when a new cloud forms; cold, smelled less air comes, but hey! Wind, would you matter being a little gentler? I’m chilling; and then were dose the sun is? Clouds hide it? I mean clouds, are you really that jealous?! I love the sun up there, don’t be so rude, let me feel the sunlight in my face, otherwise is just like a shiny, mean less, long night.

I think that’s all I have to say about weather, how it get to change my mood and how much I hate all those changes it can make me go through. For me the only good things about this type of weather are: first you dress up with many different clothes and you look more elegant and formal and it’s cool, then you drink chocolate to feel warm, you also can sleep for a long time and then you feel so comfortable with a little hug and you have always, always this friend hugging you if you feel frozen and when you have this important person for you besides and you feel almost  like an ice cube they hug you, or you hug them if they feel that way. Besides things got a lot better when sun shows up and clouds change and look like huge cotton balls.

Cloudy, grey, cold, what a day. When the weather is like this I feel sleepy and bored. Nothing can make me happy, and I hate it because I want to sleep all day and at school that’s impossible. I’m not sure if weather should be an influence in your way of being but it is for me. I love clouds and sometimes I love it when it’s cold, but they both together, well, they don’t work for me.

I really feel awkward when the weather becomes like this because I just feel without energy, sleepy, angry, completely bored and well for me that’s very uncomfortable because I like being happy and active. Also I feel kind of depressed and it’s awful feeling like this because then I start remembering ugly things of my past, sad things, and sometimes stress becomes part of that feeling I get. I prefer when it’s cloudy but at the same time the sun is shining, birds sing, and fresh air can be feel. Maybe is the energy, maybe is just the sky’s color, or it might just be something in me but the cloudy days change completely my way of acting, my way of feeling, my way of speaking, and sometimes I feel like it also changes my way of looking! Well, that might be just my tired eyes that make me look different but anyways I really feel different.

Clouds come, and they stay there, but they are boring, big, grey clouds, they have no shapes, and you can hardly realize when a new cloud forms; cold, smelled less air comes, but hey! Wind, would you matter being a little gentler? I’m chilling; and then were dose the sun is? Clouds hide it? I mean clouds, are you really that jealous?! I love the sun up there, don’t be so rude, let me feel the sunlight in my face, otherwise is just like a shiny, mean less, long night.

I think that’s all I have to say about weather, how it get to change my mood and how much I hate all those changes it can make me go through. For me the only good things about this type of weather are: first you dress up with many different clothes and you look more elegant and formal and it’s cool, then you drink chocolate to feel warm, you also can sleep for a long time and then you feel so comfortable with a little hug and you have always, always this friend hugging you if you feel frozen and when you have this important person for you besides and you feel almost  like an ice cube they hug you, or you hug them if they feel that way. Besides things got a lot better when sun shows up and clouds change and look like huge cotton balls.

My tiny little friend..

Friendship is not about knowing someone for a long time ago; friendship is more about trusting someone, knowing you can support that person and just knowing they´ll be with you every time you need them. 

With that little description about what friendship means to me I can talk about my best friend, my tiny little friend. We met 2 years ago for Semana Santa, it was a Thursday night like around 7:30 and I was at a friend’s house in Escuintla. We were hanging out, beside the pool, I was painting my nails with this strong pink nail polish and I remember the weather was pretty heavy, the air felt very wet and it smelled like sandy and salty, the moon was very shiny that night and the stars were a lot of tiny little dots in the sky.  I saw this car coming over then I thought “please God let it be a handsome, sexy guy coming here”, but this was just a dream, then I saw these little two boys coming out the car. So I say to myself “common Michelle this can’t be true! I mean maybe someone else is coming with them, if not, well, you would stay with your sister.” My first impression was he pretending to be someone popular and being too selfish and annoying. Physically he wasn’t attractive; he was a lot smaller than me, that’s why I call him my tiny little friend; skinny, almost like me; black, long hair, nothing extraordinary; green eyes, I lately discover that; nice smell, a delicious, fresh, a little acid lotion, it smelled like 212 Carolina Herrera men.  

   

That day we didn’t actually talk, we just present each other and well he talked to me and I was ignoring him, well actually I still do that but getting back to that day, I felt annoyed because he talked a lot and I know I love talking and I can’t be too much time without talking but he is worst, really I never knew someone like him. He was just talking about himself and I don’t even remember when I accepted talking to him. The next day he talked to me at the pool and I was bored so I felt like being nice with him knowing I didn’t have something else to do. We were talking when her mom played some music so I began to sing and he laughed every song they played that day, I knew it so I sing the whole day. So he told me your nickname will be “fresamuca” some idioms “fresa” meaning I’m pompous and “muca” meaning the type of person that likes and listens music not everyone likes because is very meaningless.  With this nickname our friendship began.

I came back to Guatemala that day and he called me like an hour after I left, and he told me that he missed me and I told him “Hey look I don’t know if you really thought about being more than friends or what but I just want to be your friend”.  We kept talking a lot after that but I think he didn’t felt comfortable with the answer I gave him. We then had a fight I don’t remember why but we didn’t talk for 2 or 3 months and one day he called me and I was shocked because I thought “why is he calling? Did he got what I told him?” He didn’t. He kept telling me I was very cute, and I meant a lot to him, and that I was very special and that he liked me because of how I was with him. Once again I told him I wasn’t interested on being more than her friend. That day I remember about the first impression I got from him and a thought I did get the right impression from him and that he really was like I thought he was. Time passed and we talked a lot, he called me at least three times a week and I realized I was wrong and that he was different of how I thought he was.

We became very close friends and he told me almost everything, also do I. I remember once he called me crying, his parents were fighting and he didn’t knew what to do, he was feeling extremely bad, I think this specific event our friendship became one of the most important friendships in my life. Now we have been friends for almost 2 years and I know him even more than his mom, and that’s a fact, she calls me for advice when she doesn’t know what to do with him or what to tell him things or even to punish him she calls me and ask what do I think is best.

Now that I know him a lot more I know that my first impression wasn’t that wrong, he is kind of egocentric, a little selfish and he really knows how to annoy me; but he also is confident, he knows each of my problems; he is always asking how is it going and is very rare when we fight and we don’t talk to each other for more than two days. He knows almost my whole life with every little detail and when I have a problem he is also there for me trying to help me, supporting me and sometimes showing me that I’m important to him and that doesn’t matter what happens he will always be by my side telling me how important I’m in his life.

Sometimes people ask me how can I be so patient with him and how can I tolerate him, truth is he is my best friend, and sometimes I can't stand him but even with all his strange reactions I love him, he is very special with me and he just became a very important person in my life. He just change a lot, and I like that change because he changed in a good way, and most of the problems he had with his parents were because of all this things he just changed, I'm really happy I can be part of this change, because I played an important role in those changes, changes that will change his life completely, changes that he will be greatfull for the rest of his life.

Sometimes we judge people when we just met them and we don’t even try to discover how that person is, and I had discovered that people change a lot and when you now someone you just get this little part of them and sometimes people changes the way they act with you when they really get to know you. Sometimes these annoying strangers you met become your closer friends, even your best friends, and also people you think might be your best friends become your worst enemies.  

New Year's Eve

December 31st, 2008. Is 9:00 p.m. and we just start with our family show. As always the three little girls dance the same songs and they don’t even dance; they just move a little, sing the same song they love singing every weekend after lunch, and tell jokes; jokes that we are used to laugh about even if they are not funny, because, well, they look so funny making faces when they try to tell all those big words they use and they can’t even tell them right. Now grandpas’ song, they always sing romantic songs, then our great-grandmother takes the microphone and she tells us some jokes, sometimes inappropriate jokes and those are the funniest because we try to get them and we always get them backwards. After they show they have is our time, the 5 big cousins’ time, each year we have something different. I remember once we had our rock band and it was really cool because we didn’t have real instruments just a guitar so we create our instruments with bottles and boxes, also we once make a movie and we present it and we actually didn’t finish it but it was cool. These time I sing with my older cousin and my brother play the guitar with my other cousin, then we sang “We are the world” from Michael Jackson with my little cousin and we ended with some jokes.  Something wouldn’t change ever was “Primer Infarto”, the news presentation with my mom and her two sisters, they dressed pretty elegant with black pants, white blouse and black jacket and they had the same heels so they wear them. Primer Infarto was about embarrassing news, facts, or even secrets about each family member and it was REALLY embarrassing sometimes like when they talk about my aunt having a boyfriend and her dad didn’t knew anything about it and well they just say it like such a careless thing and it became a huge problem and it was funny because later on my great grandmother tell stories about my grandma’s life that were kind of alike with what they were talking about and she get kind of upset about it but then she realized how funny it was that almost the same stories were repeated generation by generation. We finished the entire show at 11:45 more a less so we get all the fireworks our grandpa had bought for us and then it was 12:00 a.m. so each one of us eat 12 grapes and we hug each other, later we came into the house to pray and then we keep on eating a little bit, and we play some music so we dance and sing and we were all together. This was our last New Year’s eve together, and of course we didn’t knew it, a year later one of our great grandmothers die and that year also 3 of my cousins went to Atlanta, Georgia and celebrate New Year over there. Is really sad to remember about all those things we used to do as a family for about 13 years. Hopefully some day we would have another New Year eve like these, and I wish when we have kids we can have something like these with our families,  because I think for my cousins and me these thing would be always in our minds and are things we’ll never forget about because we really enjoyed preparing each of our acts. We used to spend almost 5 months preparing our shows and thinking how we could make every year special and different. Even when grandpa told us he wasn’t sure we would have this great New Year eve as usually because our great grandmother was at the hospital we thought about thing we could present at the hospital. And I think these is one of my favorite personal rituals I have, because I really enjoy it and it started like just a little game one night and it became a really important thing to us.