Some nights, when I am sleeping in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar city, I still dream of the house. The photo I did not take is branded into my memory.

In my dream, it is always a Midwest August—lemonade stand on the corner, scootering with the neighborhood kids, philosophical hammock swing dazes under an encyclopedic sky as blue as the Atlantic ocean.

In my dream, the house is always empty, just how I last saw it. I am standing in the kitchen, vats of afternoon sun pooling in through slits of fingerprint-smudged shades and warming the floorboards groaning underneath my dusty feet. Scent of freshly cut grass slips through cracked windows to tickle my nose and undercut the Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day that is eternally adhered to all the countertops, lazily lingering in the crannies of the wooden ceiling beams with the daddy long leg spiders.

In the dining room, the table is set for seven, but Dad’s carving knife has gone dull and Mom’s wine glass is chipped. The paper napkins have yellowed and one of the chairs is missing.

The swish of a match, I whip my head—the fireplace is piled high with wood. The whine of an alarm on the edge of my consciousness, a sickening stomach drop. Something is wrong, I am wrong, they’re still here, and I am the only one who left after all, all those years ago. I tear through all of the rooms, the siren is getting louder and I have to hurry, but the shadows won’t stay still and I run so fast I bash my head on the edge of the wall and burst open my stitches just like when I was four.

The carpet is an itchy, prickly, water-stained place for me to rest my head, but my initials are still penciled in under the staircase railing and the key is sharp in my palm and the whooping alarm is actually a low, ringing throb reverberating from my ear drums to deep into my bones. They have all gone. They really left.

We left. The house is gone. Dull T.V. static throbbing in my chest wakes me up most times, but the silent house never leaves the back of my eyelids.