A perfect place

No anecdote today; instead, a work of pure fiction.

The hill wasn’t high, but it crested the beaches of the lake in such a fashion as to make you feel larger than life for standing at its back. The valley walls standing their silent granite vigils added to the enormity with the sheer rock barriers hundreds of feet high, crags and cracks home to nesting hawks whose caws were the only thing brave enough to clash the reverent silence of this place. Aromas of the clear blue lake danced a wild tango with the peaches of a nearby tree; out of place in the kind of way that only a dream can be.

“It’s perfect,” she said lazily. I glanced down to see her resting, her back against the peach tree as the stainless grass cradled her weary form, her eyes closed until they sensed my own tumbling into her. As they opened, her lips bound for her brilliant emerald pools in such a graceful sprint that I could not help but smile in turn. A warmth nestled deep inside me, and I kept her gaze for a moment before turning back to look idly upon the calm water.

“Do you hate it?” I asked, my voice noticeably devoid of emotion. She stood in an effortless motion, and moved to my side, stopping with her shoulder just inches from touching mine. She followed my eyes to the middle of nowhere. “It’s boundless,” she started, “pure as when the world was new.”

I nodded. “Do you hate it?” I asked again.

She hesitated for a long moment before she whispered, “Yes.”

“Why?” I breathed, my voice barely audible.

She turned to look at me, and with impossibly honest eyes, she said “It’s missing flaws.”

A smirk I could not contain crept its way across my face, and I shot her an approving look. “If you could put a scar anywhere here, where would you put it?”

“Right here,” she poked at her left breast, “so that the waves and the peaches and the moon and the sky can look into me and weep, for I am beautiful not in spite of my flaws, but because of them.”

I kissed her, then, on top of the hill which smelled of peaches and lake water. It was such an ugly place, this perfect world, but our broken hearts made it beautiful, if only for a little while...