I think the time I laughed the hardest is when I was in mid-to-late high school. I had gone to a nearby city with my mother and younger sibling, and we had gotten tostaguacs and chips with salsa at our favorite Mexican restaurant. We were driving back to our apartment, and we all started laughing about something as we drove down the road.

I remember the smell of the older Ford station wagon from the 1980s with its fabric and vinyl seats, the giggles from my younger sibling, the laughter of my mother, and how I could not help but chuckle over a joke we shared that I now cannot remember, but I remember the feeling, the smell of that moment when we were all together, and the world, though not being anywhere near perfection, gave us a perfect moment.

It is strange to me how we often at our happiest moments cannot remember the reason behind the moment when we reflect upon them later on in life — we can only remember who we were with, the sights and smells, and the feeling of joy and soreness from laughing afterwards because we laughed so hard. I think the reason for this is because it is not important why we laughed — the circumstances behind the hilarity, but it is important that we laughed and who we shared that moment with.

The older I get, the more I realize it is not about having perfect stories. It is about having real stories: real stories filled with those we love, with the laughter, with the obstacles, with both the near perfect moments and the moments of near disaster because in the in-between is where love and honesty meet and that is life — that is where the music is. In that eye of the essence of our lives are the moments that we will remember even more than in the backstory leading up to them.

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