I am standing in a place that is bordered on three sides. Behind me is a birch forest. I cannot see it, but I know it is very deep. To my right is a small village, decrepit. The houses are made with clay and driftwood from a very distant shore, painted white. The roofs are made of birch slats that are bloated, morbid with rainwater. The windows are covered, permanently, with timber and rotted rags. The chimney are crooked, or they have fallen over, or they were never there in the first place. Dark green things grow in the streets, rich forest loam converging on the hard-packed dirt. The things have a smell, a moist mushroom on a dark morning. It coats the nostrils and throat. The smell makes me sick. I hate the smells of rain.

In front of me is a small hill, not even a hill. The wind has dried this hill, and the grasses are bright green, robust. The wind makes them dance, and they sing in rustle. Flowers shelter in their midst. There is no smell, only sound and breeze. To my right is soft white sand. I can see it, and it stretches forever, leading me to places I do not want to see anymore, places where the sounds were so loud and harch, they became soft, and my ears were weak with the ringing. In this place, everything is seen through sounds. The eyes find everything offensive here, the bright luminescent flash of grenades melting the color out of the streets and buildings, until everything became dun, tan, and white. Everything is covered with thin, gritty dust. It makes everything hopeless. Everything is unhappy. Animals low and shriek-they are always dying, blood pouring from beggin eyes and pleading mouths. The bones of horses lie in splinters everywhere, and camel's teeth sit in the road. The dust turns the blood brown. Everything is dun, tan, white, and brown. I couldn't hear footsteps, and so I never knew if we were running or walking. We ran, until running became walking. We hung our heads, to avoid seeing. And even then, the ground taunted us, with sand and offal.

I will climb over the hill. And I do.

Behind this hill is a beautiful city, medieval, bright red and deep brown houses leaning together, the roofs made of stone and tile and wood. The streets were cobblestone, crooked and ancient, refelcting the setting sun at their crowns. Trees struggled upward, between houses and next to statues, displacing the cobble and wending around the stone. Church spires shot into the sky, spearing the clouds and lacerating the smoke that blew through the skies. Beyond the city lay the ocean, and I knew it was the deepest ocean ever. It was the place were the salt water met the sweet, that if I sailed far enough into it's expanse, I would find something to make the world beautiful. I turned to look at the wood behind me, the village, and finally, the desert. My heart was glad.

I returned my eyes to the city, and it was in silent flames. The night became red as it crumbled upon itself, a pile of embers by the sea.

The village rotted into nothing, the roofs splayed out on the foul mud. The rags had rotted away, and broken jugs lay in the streets.

The forest was dark, unspeakably dark, the birches sick, bent with disease and dying.

So I returned to the desert, where all water tastes of blood and sweat, where we are blind and deaf and tired, marching on and on on our feet, cracked and swollen and too infected to bleed. And I remained there.