Money passes into the hands of the seller in the same transaction in which the commodity passes into the hands of the buyer. Commodities and money thus flow in opposite directions and this change of place in which the commodity passes over to one side and money to the other side, occurs simultaneously at an indefinitely large number of points on the entire surface of bourgeois society. But the first step which the commodity makes in the sphere of circulation is also its last step.[72] Whether it leaves its place on account of its attraction for gold (C―M), or on account of its attraction by gold (M―C), with one move, with one change of place it falls out of the sphere of circulation into that of consumption. Circulation is a continuous flow of commodities, but different commodities all the time, since each commodity makes but one move. Every commodity enters upon the second phase of its circulation not as the same commodity, but as another commodity, gold. Hence the movement of a metamorphosed commodity is the movement of gold. The same piece of gold or the identical gold coin which changed places with one commodity in the act C―M, reappears from the opposite end as the starting point for M―C and thus changes places for the second time with another commodity. Just as it passed from the hands of buyer B into those of seller A, it now leaves A’s hands who has become a buyer and passes into C’s hands. The path described by a commodity in its transformation into money and its retransformation from money, i. e., the movement of a complete metamorphosis of a commodity assumes the aspect of an apparent movement of the same coin that changes places twice with two different commodities. No matter in how scattered and haphazard fashion purchases and sales may take place near each other, there is always in actual circulation a seller for each buyer and the money which moves into the place of the commodity sold, before it came into the hands of the buyer, must have already changed places with another commodity. Sooner or later it again leaves the hands of the seller, who turns buyer, to pass into the hands of a new seller and this frequently repeated change of place forms the interlacing of the metamorphoses of commodities. The same coins are moving, some more, others less frequently, from one place in the sphere of circulation to another, always in the direction opposite to that of the commodities moved, thus describing a longer or shorter circulation-curve. The different movements of the same coin can follow each other in point of time only, and on the contrary, the many scattered purchases and sales which appear as so many separate changes of place between commodities and money, occur simultaneously separated only in point of space.