I love the Valley. More than anywhere else I've visited, even Saskatchewan where it is finally quiet excepting the tiny buzz of the wheat and the ringing of the stars.
(People say in the prairies they feel the most small, but for me, it is less like being an ant, and more like realizing one is a toe. Alone, you are tiny, but as a part of the whole you are mighty. And being pressed between the heavy dome of the sky and the solid immensity of the rock, one cannot possibly be alone.)
The road winds forever, and every turn hides it all but Now in tiny empty moments of asphalt, infinitely different in its eternal sameness.
I love every iteration.
I love the jutting rocks breaking through the grass and trees. I love the quiet murmur of the greenery, and the shadowy spirits I can see in the gaps when we're driving too fast to censor and build divisions about what's real. I am constantly gleeful over the lack of warning or boundary between forest and cliff and field and bog. A tarot deck shuffled over and over, laid out in saga not seidr.
There are dead and dying towns, hotels and gas stations, but restful and content in their rot. The ghosts, more in Hel than Hades, drinking joyfully in a job well completed.
In a world where nothing's real anymore and even your brain screams "'Shopped!" at every sunset, the world contained inside the frame of the car window seems a too-sharp painting witch-touched, or the moment in front of the mirror when it gives away the subtle differences on this side and that and I just know I could walk through and dance in the green and grey or blue and white, forever frozen in heaven's perfection if I just could find the right cantrip, the right angle to unlock the fountain in my heart and go home.
The moment when the music in my ears reaches it's pinnacle, spiralling even past the highest notes my mind can conceive and I fall in sync and finally, finally shatter. Like the peaceful tumbling flakes of the motel's rotting roof brushed by the slow repossession of the forest. |