On the day it happens, a small crowd of us will watch from the smoke shop parking lot across the street in camping chairs. We’ll watch the workers get in their giant machines and bark orders at each other. It will take a while for something to happen. Some of the people in our crowd will say that they wish they’d brought snacks. Not me. I will come prepared. I will have a Snapple and a bag of Cheez-Its in my lap. Eventually, we’ll watch a wrecking ball smash through the curved glass of the sunroom like it never mattered. The last time I was in there, you still had a body and I still rolled my eyes at every other thing you said. We still had bedrooms in our parents’ house. We still had no idea.

“I should have eaten more Baconators,” I will say, observing the carnage, chewing Cheez-Its. “I should have ordered more Frostys.”

Someone beside me will put down her binoculars and look at me. She will have kind eyes with deep creases all around, like the warm wrinkled bun of a smash burger. “You can’t do this alone,” she will say, and I will appreciate the sentiment, but I will know that we can’t do this together, either. Because you turn your back for two seconds and the 7-11 vanishes to make way for a parking lot for some grey office building, the deli transforms into an urgent care, your brother’s bedroom is a room for your mother’s blue macaw, and down the street, the Ken-Taco-Hut is just a shell of its former self, a brittle dead tree miraculously still standing, the sign torn from its carcass but all the other signs still there: precarious architecture and red trim, a boarded-up drive thru window, the ghost of a speaker box, a weathered menu board listing buckets of chicken legs and tacos and personal pan pizzas and answers to questions you didn’t know you had like how many more kisses and knock-knock jokes and papercuts until I die?, slightly dusty windows, tables and chairs left in strange positions inside like everyone had gone in a hurry—like they thought they had more time.