myth for calafate

You know who I mean. You’ve seen them. If you’re hearing this, you may even recognize these faces in yourself.

The girls were crazy. I mean they tore their clothes. I mean they swung from cliffs. They broke their ankles and carried each other. I mean they made their own crowns out of each others hair and sticks and leaves and strands of flowers. I mean they screamed and laughed at nothing and covered themselves in mud. If I showed you a picture all you would see closed eyes or wide eyes, legs, arms, shoulder and mouths wide open. You would see a wall of girls wrapped around each other and flipping you off. Or just standing there. You might even see them walking away from you, all together. You would understand that you could never know their secret.

You might catch a whiff as they run by. Only if you came too close they’d bite. If you’re not scared of them yet, you should be. They aren’t afraid of thorns. They hunt with their bare hands. They come from lineages of women who worked in poison and blood.

These were crazy girls with hot cheeks, making fire with their spit, swimming in the freezing white water streams with the salmon.

They originally came from caves where they lived in small crevices in the rock with the people there. That is, until one day they peaked through a window and saw a cloud. It walked over the auburn earth, full of lightning, and trembling with thunder. Rain ran through it in celestial streams. And from their small openings they saw the cloud sing. It sang and flung its head back, whipping rain into the wind. It sang the most beautiful song and it danced, its arms outstretched and clenched and legs as dark and blue as stone. It sang with a kind of passion and abandon, vulnerability and truth that they understood something within themselves.

That was when they started acting corrupt. It won’t be easy to express in this language. Some might call it ecstasy, but it hurt just a little too. They felt the world with a kind of profound joy, and the smallest amount of heartbreak. They had a touch of logic to their actions, but mostly it was wild even when they destroyed everything, even when they ate extra honey and put it in their hair. Even when they overturned every table they saw before they ran out toward the cloud and sang with it, they screamed the song they whispered the song, they became the music. That was when their lives began.

You might find them running still, rushing, in the corner of your eye. You may feel their bated breath on your neck, but when you turn they will freeze in their frenzy, arms and legs entwined, knotted, looped, reaching into the form of the calafate, and you must approach them then carefully. You may even eat a berry of their branch, but they require blood as their offering.