On Thursday, when you haven’t been touched for three days, you go to Auntie Anne's like it's the only place you could go. And for some reason, maybe just December, you arrive and find it thriving. One friend tells you he doesn't know what Auntie Anne's is, and you reply that you can't believe that's possible. But you also never thought it possible that this year could be this year, that this world could be this world, that you could still find a crowded mall with a too-busy parking lot and sit down on a bench to hear a boy on the opposite side explain the entourage effect to an older woman — his grandma or cousin or mother's friend, with an accent so Bostonian it's overwhelming. You saw recently how the mall you wrote that poem on got torn down, a legacy of where you wore out three pairs of flip-flops that had your nickname on the strap in rhinestone charms. That place to where you claimed you would never return, now gone, gone, brought into rubble and dust. But somehow, today, you can believe this for a moment: there may be something left for the redemptive power of nostalgia. And somehow, today, you believe this may be too: that these weird new Crocs and socks that all the kids are in… well, maybe that's what they, one day, will have the blessing of getting to miss. One day, they too may seek analgesia in a not-so-dying mall from the fact the best friend they've never met has poisoned herself in Missouri. They, too, can numb the fear of her liver failing through the universality of oversized ornaments — through the reliable sweetness of processed cheese dip, the glittering sale marquees.