Ten or twelve long miles south of Bend, Ore., on US 97 is a resort community called Sunriver, which most of you know already because you have been there with me, at times. Sunriver is one of those places that lacks its own meaning and is instead a pastiche of things that happen between people who go there. It is, in fact, almost breathtaking in its inherent vapidity. Its footprint is several square miles of fractal cul-de-sacs and loops, organic shaped Moebius strips of  roads that reject all notions of right angles. There is no way to know where you are, ever, and this is compounded by scads of numbered traffic circles that eject more roads off at random, soft angles. I doubt I have ever been to the same place twice in Sunriver, or if I have, I probably wouldn’t know it. There are about ninety five trillion vacation rental houses and they are all entirely identical. That’s not entirely true. But they have unsettling conceptual similarity: rustic, shitty decor in shades of dreamcatcher and sad early-90s hunter green; vaulted ceilings and dreadful southwest-themed dinnerware and carpeted stairs. Every vacation home in Sunriver sleeps about threescore people in grim, vast chambers full of bunkbeds. The hot tubs are always, always, always two to three degrees too much on the luke side of warm and the rental agency or owners leave laminated, uptight lists of instructions left next to each appliance or thing that can catch fire or dent.

Last weekend I was in Sunriver with David and we were looking for spring-fed headwaters to an eponymously-named river nearby and I saw that Sunriver had a school, which I knew but had forgotten. It occasioned a consideration that there must be at least five or six people who actually live in Sunriver year-round. That must be a very singular lifestyle, fulfilling quotidian needs in the well-hidden service park, mastering the non-Euclidean, serpentine layout. Perhaps they travel in secret, linear underground tunnels and smirk secretly at the rest of us. Alternately, perhaps one day I will encounter a disheveled, long-lost Sunriver resident who has been trying to find his way back to Ridgeview #7 for two decades. Maybe the joke’s on us. Maybe Sunriver is not just a staging area for outdoor desert activities. Perhaps there is a portal to another universe off of Circle 12. Maybe the residents are in fact millennia old and truly enlightened. Let me stress: the place is a goddamned Gordian knot of houses and roads. I wish to find an Alexander who can make sense of it for me, though I fear that underneath the geographical complexity might lurk a sucking void. Sunriver is utopia in the strictest sense of the word; utopia (non-idiomatically) means “no place.”

If you look at the important things in life as having two sides–the concrete and the spiritual–Sunriver is the third, at least with respect to the desert. It is the emptiness onto which things are written, the context for the syntax of the meaningful (or maybe the syntax for the context of the meaningful). It has a lot of nice bike lanes and Ponderosas. The weather is nearly always perfect, if cold. Sunriver is the inverse of the rest of the things about the desert, but it is simultaneously like dividing by zero. It exists/doesn’t exist. It is an imaginary number, a null, an empty string.

Why do I ruminate on the meaningless, then, you might ask? Because it was in Sunriver, in a house I’ll never be able to find again, that I first saw David.