Things change continuously, trickling over vast black expanses of nothing and something, turning with heat into red and then blue and then violet, flashing across the sky with the fury of the forgotten beholders, sliding through clouds like sharp knives through soft skin, dissolving onto a thousand particles, red, yellow, orange and green, making curves in the air like great transparent domes of rainbow metal, reaching deep into the earth like brown wrinkled hands of old skinny men packed to the last gap with stories and regrets, drilling deep into the cold shapeless stone, past the seas of lava and into the heart that is silent, vibrating like a guitar string that is plucked and then being expelled forth, through lava, to stone, to the ground, to the sky and out into the nothingness, forever unaware that anything has truly happened.

Thus, things stay the same.

The valley rests on the western edge of the snowy peaks at the edge of knowledge. Hints of the places that can’t be spoken are scattered throughout its busy curving highways, groans of pleasure that call other cities and speckled laughter with shades of jokes that can’t be repeated. It is seven miles long from east to west and only a mile wide, from the edge of clear stone where the mountain has been broken in two by the axe of a titan to the edge of the coffin where his body rests. Six slender snakes of icy water find their way from the unreachable heights and coalesce into a single strong boa constrictor that pushes its way through the valley, cutting it in two. North and south of the water, the valley is made of forest, flowering green punctured by death and the remains of fire, open spaces of dry grass and frantic noises in the dirt and busy streets of large vans with screaming little boys, women in sleeveless T-shirts and ripped shorts, men carrying large metal barbecues and older couples walking hand in hand and talking softly under their breath.

The valley is never the same twice and yet the valley stays the same.

The valley opens up to the curious traveler from the west in two faces of awesome restraint, the unified stillness of gray a silent challenge on the right and the scattered remains of spiritual dismemberment to the left, covered in the soothing cold of the forgetfulness that falls from the sky with a roar. Pillars stand beyond, guardians of the unspoken, reigning over kingdoms of snakes, pebbles and brush, facing the road that passes below them with the same clarity they gave the lizards, the men of coal and the men of corn. One single additional sentinel remains to the south, crowned in its solitude with a mouth of blue granite, drops of ice dripping from its ragged teeth. On the north there are three brothers, the ones that managed to stay together, through the shocking ambush of the realm of no return, and here they stand now, where they did and they have and they will, unfazed and unbroken. The winged king overlooks it all, as solid and stoic as all the others, but more so in its frozen jump into open space, never staying, never leaving.

Here they all have come to rest, right where they first emerged from the void. And here they count the hours and stay the same.

The ice that presses tightly together in the heights of the mountains slowly drifts apart with the coming of the warm music from the south, and as it turns to flowing, to resonant rhythm that comes to replace the deep drone of the cold, it starts to flow down, splashing over forgotten rocks, bathing the broken trees that have fallen, kissing the feet of the ones that stay upright. As the trickle becomes a roar, and the gentle kisses become the crashing of ferocious lust it finally arrives at an open space, a jump of no return, where it surrenders all that it has known, all that it came to love and enjoy, all that was once its land of pleasures and recurrent rhythmic shifts. In this surrender it is suspended for beautiful seconds in the nothingness from which it came. In this terrible and ungraspable moments it understands, it knows what it was and what it is, it reaches for answers but there is nothing and that nothing is the only true answer. And so it gains the truth and immediately loses it as it scatters once again into the multiplicity of desire and the single scream of hard cold final rock that waits at the bottom of the valley.

The moment is forever shocking and new, but the moment stays the same.

The valley is one but it is many, and the many that it is form the one. The many come from dust and return to dust. But the dust remains. And the many that surround the dust as it flutters up with the cold winds of the mountains… those stay to be one in their multitude and many in their loneliness. Some of them stay in place, waiting for eager news of other places, sucking on the fallen triumphs of the unknown heroes, grasping at the remains of the defeated. They dance with dry leaves and broken twigs on the scarred skin of the one. They push up with hands of power, reaching for companionship and finding other fingers that caress them and puncture them and intertwine with them until they have forgotten where it was that they were one and how they came to be many. They run from hole to hole, grasping at tiny treasures held with locks of hair, chewing at the edges and laughing at the ones that are still looking. They press their backs against rugged trunks and growl ferociously into the night, rejoicing in the sheer sensuousness of hearing their own power echoed back from the heights of the precipices. They jump from rock to rock, grabbing at the edges with sharp long claws, beyond any fear of consequences or danger, knowing that of all the dangers that there may be, they are the most dangerous of all. They slide over the ground with a singing tongue and lazy disposition, pressing their cold dying skin against the soil for warmth, rising just barely above the covering yellow to spot a target that may satisfy their nightly cravings. They fly over the peaks of the lonely branches, they sit on the edge of the dying trunks, they sing curvaceous songs that defy the certainty of the beginning and the end and they come to rest in the darkness of the place that is also themselves, beneath the shade of their own forearms, above the shivering of their own speckled skin.

As they are many, they are all forever changing.
As one, they are all forever the same.

In the midst of the maze without walls, I walk with ghosts that speak in whispers. I hear the voice of a small Latino man, who lets his heart flow out through his nose, and bleed onto his hairless chin. I see the midnight movements of his sister as she shivers under the blankets and crushes her knees against her chest. I hear the laughter of the tall amphetamine addict, holding an electric guitar on one hand and a Bible on the other. I see my old friend, who might have been as he said or may not have been anything at all, sitting against a tree and recounting tales that we have shaped together into myths that scatter from our lips like trails of old saliva. I am alone in the valley. They are all gone. And so they have changed and I have been forced to change with their transitions. And so the valley is not as it was. But as I sit against an old burnt out trunk, I hear the one voice that is quiet and touches me second hand through the singing and the rustling and the dripping and the shaking.

It has no beginning.
It has no end.
It forever stays the same.