There is no place where people walk, silent and unceasing. They don't walk in great circles, the unrelenting landscape blending in their heads. They don't meet only occasionally, exchanging blank stares and no words, for they have never yet met someone who would speak to them, and eventually gave up trying themselves.

The dust doesn't swirl at their heels, settling back over their footprints like a soft blanket.

The gentle silence of the place doesn't swallow the sounds of their passing like a rock dropped into a bottomless well.

There isn't a place where it isn't hot, yet also isn't cold. A place that seems abandoned by the concept of temperature entirely.

The starlight doesn't fall evenly from every direction, smoothing shadows into meaningless nimbuses of faintest color painted across the unrelenting ground.

There are no children there, long since forgetting how they came. They don't invent childish games, and forget them, and invent them again.

They don't roll down the meager slopes, covering themselves in dust and crushing the flowers that grow in the sheltered nooks.

They don't sit on their knees, staring at the crushed flowers and crying for no reason they can remember.

The flowers don't grow back in time, the temporary setback forgotten.

The time doesn't pass like water, eons slipping through the fingers of the silent inhabitants of that place.

There isn't a single bird, in this place. It doesn't sit in the dusty remains of its life work, a mountain to wipe its beak on no longer there. It doesn't silently regard the plains of dust that it caused and wish in vain that it knew how to put them back together.

There are no dark and dismal hills waiting to welcome us.

Instead, there's everything else.