When the waves washed me ashore, my mouth was full of sand.
I opened my eyes and saw a goat gnawing on the strap of my backpack. It’s not an ordinary goat — it has a golden horn and two emerald eyes. When I sat up, it didn’t run and looked at me with slanted eyes. There was the sound of music in the distance, intermittently, like someone playing the out-of-tune lira. This is Ambrosia Island, the legendary resort of God, which now looks like a forgotten amusement park.
The first one I met was a big man lying in a hammock. He calls himself Hephaestus, but he has no calluses on his hands and the stove is cold. “I seem to have forgotten how to hammer,” he said in a slightly confused tone, “but I remember that I should be a blacksmith.” He threw a few pieces of metal with a strange shape at his feet, like a failed homework. I helped him pick up the scattered tools. He stared at the hammer for a long time and finally said, “Maybe tomorrow.”
The island is not big, and you can meet all the “gods” after walking around. Aphrodite sighed in front of the mirror and said that she had forgotten which lipstick was best for her. Ares piled up a sand castle on the beach, and kicked it irritably when it was half of it. They were all wearing holiday flower shirts and drinking brightly colored drinks, but their eyes were empty, like people who slept until the afternoon and didn’t wake up completely.
My work has begun. It’s not to save the world, but to help them remember who they are. Apollo’s seven-stringed harp is missing one string. He said that the music sounds “doesn’t sound right.” I found a suitable material in the reeds in the east of the island — a glowing spider silk. It’s not how good I am, but when I listen to him play the piano, I noticed that he always avoids that sound. When he handed the spider silk to him, he was stunned for a moment, and then his fingers crossed the strings, and a complete melody flowed out.
It’s more troublesome to help Aphrodite choose lipstick. She spread out twenty on the table, and the color difference of each was as small as an illusion. She couldn’t say which one she liked, but said “no” repeatedly. I sat down and tried on the back of my hand. When I tried the eighth, she suddenly grabbed my wrist and said, “Stop.” It’s a very pale coral color. “That’s it,” she said, “this is the color I painted on my first date.” Then she smiled, not the perfect smile of the goddess, but the smile of ordinary people when they think of sweet little things.
Fragments of memory are hidden in every corner of the island. For a moment, there was a shell with blurred music score, a reef with sword marks, and a spring that could not reflect the complete reflection. I seem to be playing a huge puzzle, but I don’t know what the complete pattern is, and I don’t know what will happen if I put it together. The most difficult thing is Dionysus. He sat at the back of the bar, drinking glass after glass, but he couldn’t taste it. “Like water,” he said, “all like water.”
I found that he never added the bottle of blue berries in the middle when he was brewing wine. It’s not that he doesn’t want to add it, but every time his hand reaches there, it will stop and turn to the other side. I stuffed the berries into his hand. He stared at it, like staring at an alien creature, and then slowly squeezed out the juice and dripped it into the wine glass. The wine turned into a swirling dark purple. He took a sip, choked, coughed, and then began to cry. It’s not sadness, but the kind of crying of “Ah, it turns out to be this taste”.
As I help more and more things, the island is changing. It’s not the appearance, but the atmosphere. The sound of music became more coherent, and the sand castles on the beach began to have complex structures, and more bonfires could be seen at night. The gods still can’t remember everything, but they will say hello and ask, “Did you find anything interesting today?” Once, Hephaestus really got on fire. When the stove lit up, everyone gathered around, like a miracle.
It was dusk when I left. The goat came to see me off, and there was a small necklace made of spider silk and shells hanging on the golden horn. The gods waved their hands on the beach. Their postures were still a little rusty, but they waved very seriously. Ambrosia Island has not returned to its mythical appearance. It is still a forgotten resort. But now they remember how to play a song, make a glass of wine, and make a fire. Memory did not come back completely, but the ability to remember came back.
After exiting the game, I turned out the old album. Seeing a photo, I was standing by the sea, laughing so stupidly that I can’t remember why I laughed. But I know that the sun was fine and the sand was very hot.
It turns out that the so-called “repairing memory” is not necessarily to retrieve every detail. Sometimes it’s just to help someone, or help yourself, touch the temperature that warms the memory again — such as the frequency of string vibration, the texture of the lipstick, or a distant, sunny afternoon hidden in a glass of wine.
_Mythwrecked_ didn’t let me witness the miracle. It taught me how to gently remind a person who has forgotten himself on an island that is about to be forgotten: Look, this is your favorite color. Listen, this is the melody you played. Taste, this is the taste you created. And you are never just a stranger in a flower shirt and in a daze in the hammock.
