What is Valaquencia? For some, it is a place, a town, a city, or an empire that once flourished. For others, it is a thing, a description, or an action. You can drive one thousand miles west from Boston, Massachusetts and arrive at a hamlet called Valaquencia; you can travel in the opposite direction and find its acropolis on an unknown island in the northern Atlantic. You can walk into a gallery and find it as the title of every single painting on its walls and sculpture on its floors. It could be a scientific phenomenon that dictates the pull of gravity or the push of barometric pressure. A child stands by the ocean picking his nose. He smears it on a large rock when no one is looking. The beach on which he is standing is one off the Andalusian coast and its name is Valaquencia. It could have once been the name of a warring faction, like the Montagues, the Capulets, the Guelphs, the Ghibellines. Or it is an old man tending to his herbarium reciting his favorite dramaturgical verses to himself. The fact that it can be all this at the same time-- a noun, an adjective, and a verb-- leads us to believe that Valaquencia is in fact the very term for things that do not have one. So I can say Valaquencia is an undiscovered star cluster, or that it was once a contending name for ancient Mycenae, or simply it is the name of a beautiful woman, or a lonely woman, or the woman you never met. Yes, in fact that is the best explanation. It is the name of the woman you never met. You can meet a woman who you think you know as Valaquencia just to discover that she is actually the same woman you met thirty years ago, whose name is actually Veranda. In fact, you can take a woman, any woman, and you subtract her arms, her legs, her shoulders blades, every single facial feature, and just as the act of trying to recall a place you have forgotten, you find in naming this woman without a face or digits or distinguishable characteristics that her name will always unwaveringly be, Valaquencia.
