Too much beauty is a painful thing.

I grew up in a small village. It was beautiful.

Clean air, fragrant lands, a never-ending sky that bled beautiful colors with every rising and setting sun. But it wasn’t just what one saw. The beauty could also be felt.

The people were beautiful too.

They were prisms that refracted beauty into its most magnificent traits.

Kindness, generosity, brotherhood, every aspect of beautiful in its purest form. We breathed joy and contentment and filled our bellies with gratitude three times a day.

Beautiful stories are made up of such blissful descriptions.

But beauty must be protected from the evil eye. And that is where we all miserably failed.

They came in the darkness of the night. Camouflaged by the rumbling storm in the distance.

At first they were patient, separating the men from the girls and women. Young boys like me were left inside, rifles aimed at our fragile heads.

It was too quiet, and then Hell swallowed our village.

The gunfire, endless.

It shredded the peace, briskly destroying loving bonds. I covered my ears when the girls and women began to scream. My heart listened, desperate to recognize my mother and sister.

But agony sounds the same.

Hours and hours, yet the end never came. My tears hadn’t dried when we were pushed outside. There was nothing left of the beauty I had known.

I avoided the stares of the dead. The fields of saffron had been set ablaze. Their burning scent worse than any earthly odor.

Twelve of us left our broken village and its shattered beauty behind.

We were brainwashed – Beauty is the root of all evil.

As I lift my rifle and aim, I wish I had died that night.

At least it would’ve saved the beauty inside me.

She knows their deepest desires and darkest secrets. Only they hear her loving call – Come To Me

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