Imperfections in perfection

Coming to a island, a paradise of an island that I'd thought and dreamed about coming to and finding it as beautiful and perfect as I'd heard unfurled in me a sense of relief in the most overwhelming, tear-inducing way. Id just arrived on Havelock Island, one of the Andaman Islands, it was just perfect, in a prefectly perfect way.

The sea was a pale, glass-clear delicate turquoise, the colour of innocence, of a baby's eyes. This lead into a deep, intense teal that melted into a smooth, liquid navy blue. The coral sand was the shade of purity itself, a softly burning white. Shards and fragments, like bleached bones among the grains, pricked sharp on my bare feet, a gentle reminder that this visible beauty on land was formed, shaped, built on the death of underwater beauty. Below the soft blue waves, the sea guarded it hidden reefs and bright fish. The palm trees curled drunkenly towards the sea, dipping and swaying their beckoning leaves, calling me, urging me to sit beneath their shade. The quiet fuzz of the white waves, whispered a song of tranquility as it wriggled up the sand, before sinking again into its pillow softness. The dying sunlight washed the sky rose pink and an egg-yolk yellow boat moored just offshore rolled languidly on the waves. The breeze nudged my warm skin, freckling my glasses with spray. Opposite the beach a mile or so away, was another island. On it, mossy puffs of dense jungle covered the horizon, underlined with a fine strip of white, the beach twin of this one.

I couldn't believe I was in a place of such perfection, that such a place of perfection even existed and that I should he allowed to see it in reality, not in a dream or a photo that I didn't trust, its flat surface reducing it to a poverty of printing, incapable of capturing the feel, the now, the depth of its perfection. You had to be there, actually, physically there to understand and know its moving, quivering, evanescent beauty.

Yet this luminous, wonderous place filled me with an unbearable sadness: I had come here alone and alone I marvelled at it. To make my reality complete, to make me be sure I wasn't imagining this vision, one vital element was missing - someone to share it with. It was so unbearably romantic, so laden with the essence of being in love in a lovely place. To sit surrounded by it and by the arms of the man I love, both of us silent in admiration and contemplation, would have been a bliss; a shining, complete, totality of perfection.

I called him, the crackling line, like nails in my heart, spiking me with the knowledge of just how far away he was. 'It's so beautiful, so perfect,' I choked. 'I wish you were with me now.'
'I know Baby, I wish I was there too.But,' - ever-practical, ever positive - 'you enjoy it and make the most of it.' In that moment I didn't think I could. 'It's wasted without you. It's wasted on me on my own.' Tears choked me. My gruff, rational mind knew how silly, how uncaring, how unfair it was to find the one thing that was wrong with an otherwise perfect situation, but I couldn't help myself. I felt dislocated from this beauty, out-of-place and so terribly alone. Foolish, in fact, to be in this languid turquoise heaven without having an Other to share it with.

Of course I appreciated it, how could I not? But I wanted, I needed, to have someone to turn my open-mouthed face to; to show my smile of delirious delight to; to see my expression of wonder reflecting back at me from his own shining happiness.

I blame tiredness, as I always do. It had taken a five-hour ferry trip to get here and the thick, weighing humidity leached my energy to leave me dull and slow - and emotional. When I'm tired my senses are heightened - sounds are louder and brighter; colours more vivid, smells more powerful, sensations deeper - so a place of such beauty is rendered all the more so. Fatigue is the drug that opens up and folds out my reality, leaving its tender inner recesses exposed to the cruel weight and scratch of what's missing, the pain of the non-present. And my emotions were fragile and brittle too. The gentle, healing touch of paradise crumbled them to a fine dust, as fine as the sand on which I sat. They ran through my fingers uncontrollably, falling to rest on the ground beneath me, and so becoming part of the bright beauty itself.

But sleep will restore and reconstruct me from the inside out. It will quietly in the small, black hours, fold back the raw nerves of heightened reality and close the wound revealed, protecting me from the pain of wanting what I cannot have. The dark jungle will hold and soothe me, its soft chattering creatures, mysterious bird calls and clicking insects will lull me and when I wake to the breeze-ruffled palms I will fall in love with this island again, on my own, in my own way.