“The movie theater I used to work at was razed to the ground,” Katie says, slashing with her hand like she’s chopping down a tree.

“Oh yeah,” our friend John says, “mine was just abandoned, so....”

They continue regaling each other with horror stories of teenage labor, but my mind leaps ahead, far into the future, imagines the places we worked like dogs, or played as kids, the buildings we used to dream and eat in, the churches we sat in on Sundays, bored and far from transcendent, the schools we escaped or hid in, all the places that shaped us with their constrictions or carved us with their sharp edges, all of them decaying, empty, built over, or simply gone to grass in an empty field as if they never were.

A cold wind blows through me as I come back to myself, sitting on the couch in my cluttered, happy home, returning from a world I will never see.