faces in stone

You can’t drive past a place called Skull Rock and not stop, right? Up close, the skull itself was there—eye sockets hollowed by time, nose a soft gouge—but what caught me more was everything around it. The whole landscape was scattered with massive boulders that looked like they’d tumbled out of the sky and never bothered to land properly.

Faces, or parts of faces, peeked out from rounded stone. Curves that looked like shoulders, knees, a hand curled into the cliffside. The rocks weren’t just formations: they were characters. Some weathered into expressions. Some piled in awkward silence. There was a kind of casual monumentality to it all. Like giants had once lived here, sat down, and forgot to get back up.

It made me think about what we leave behind, and how much of it sticks around longer than we do. A broken silhouette, a shadow that sort of resembles something familiar. The desert doesn’t try to preserve meaning. It just holds the form until the wind finishes the job.