One memory that remains vibrantly clear to this day is the day I flew a kite for the first time. This particular memory is as colorful as the kite itself, with its two long tails and its huge body striped with all the bold colors of the rainbow. Dad bought it from a man selling kites at a beach stand where there must have been fifty different kites all billowing haphazardly from the wind. I must have been no older than ten and this kite was as large as myself. On days when the wind was particularly strong, I staggered from the weight of it and had to put in all the strength of a ten-year-old to not have this giant kite drag me around. My parents often took me to a quiet beach nearby home where there weren't a lot of people and I would run the length of the edges of the beach, flying this gigantic kite with the sound of the wind rushing through my ears.
The reason this memory has stuck with me for so long is probably because every aspect of it, the big beautiful kite with all its fantastic colors and the backdrop of the lonely beach that somehow seemed wintry even in the summer are all so wistfully idyllic. I can't remember much of where I lived then but this memory makes me strangely melancholy and nostalgic for a place I don't remember enough to be missing. Perhaps it was the carefreeness of it all and the Kodak-picture-perfect candidness of it that seems so strange now.
I took this kite wherever I went and I remember showing it off to my cousins on the roof of my grandmother's house. It ended abruptly when the kite crashed onto the side of the building and it never recovered after that. I couldn't fly it anymore afterwards but I still held onto the remains for years, begging my parents not to throw it out until finally, I was able to get over both the kite and its memories.
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