The river would burn our skin with cold and let us appear as statues made of ice. We put up with the thousands of ice-swords stabbing our pale skin because it made us feel beautiful.

We would slither up boulders towards the waterfall. Climbing in the way mermaids would; cutting our knees and calfs and thighs, because skin isn’t as tough as scales but she had red hair, so I called her Ariel anyways.

A waterfall shower sounds exotic, and magnificent, but we would stand under the water that seemed to fall magically from the sky and let our skin, our bones, turn purple. The feeling wasn’t exotic, wasn’t magnificent. It was as if God was stomping on our heads and slapping us in the face with his waterfall tears.

We would crawl up pine trees and then laugh blissfully at the scent it left in our hair. We ignored the scratches that appeared on our cheeks and necks and limbs, and the itch stinging our skin that seemed to consume us from the inside-out. We were on top of the world, level with the mountains. Or at least the roof of our house.

We ignored, and pretended not to notice our beaten bodies, because we felt beautiful, in our actions. And every little scratch, every patch of black and blue was a memory, a necesary scar in order to attain that worthwhile, fleeting feeling of beautiful.