We used to say witches lived there. Probably everyone did something like that when they were a kid. A whole family of witches in our case, living in big old house set way back from the sidewalk that was most likely apartments but we didn’t realize that. We’d see old people shuffle in and out and thought they were all witches and dared each other to make eye contact with them from across the street. It wasn’t like the movies where someone loses a ball in the backyard or breaks a window and has to go in for it. We never even stepped on their huge lawn stretching what seemed like miles to the front door. We didn’t play ball much anyway.

On the occasions that our parents kicked us out of the house to get some exercise, to get our eyes away from the TV, we’d play pretend. We were adventurers or robots or detectives or monsters. I need to know that you know, my dad once said to me after a school shooting he’d heard of on the radio, that fantasy is separate from reality. I nodded and said of course I knew that, I was a smart kid, I knew that just because I could do a 720 in Tony Hawk didn’t mean I could stay on a skateboard for more than a few seconds, because I’d tried.

I’m not so sure you knew, though. The first time we went into the dark little hobby shop next to our elementary school and the bald-headed uncle behind the counter gave us a big sales pitch on Magic: The Gathering you gawped wide-eyed. He asked if we’d ever wanted to summon monsters, cast spells on our enemies, amass ancient artifacts. For real? You asked, and you weren’t kidding. Years later he moved the shop across town, then the next time I thought to check on him, he was gone.

It’s funny, we grew up in this age before the internet sitting in front of our TVs not realizing that millions of other kids were watching the exact same things we were, not realizing we were forming memories that would be mined for nostalgia by t-shirt companies, YouTube channels, reunion specials, remakes, re-releases, rehashes, repackagings. But then there are those memories that are a little more private. Does anyone but me think about that little old man who sat in that musty store? Does anyone but me think about the witches’ house? It starts to feel like a burden, a duty to recall. Every obscure 90s cartoon is being kept alive on countless wikis but once I forget about these figures, they’re gone forever. How many people remember you? Your parents are gone. Maybe some of the other kids we went to school with. Everyone heard about it back then.

It was the first time I really realized that bad things could happen. We’d been bored. It was a hot summer day — average now, I guess — and your mom had shooed us outside. The rec center pool was closed and we didn’t have the money for popsicles. You got this look in your eyes that you sometimes did when a stray impulse entered your brain and I wanted to go home but the thought of walking back, crossing four intersections on my own, was too much. You said you were going to knock on the door of the house across the street. I begged you not to go. You did anyway. The last time I saw you, you were reaching your little hand up to the knocker when the door swung backwards into the black interior. You didn’t run. Why didn’t you run?

When they asked the old people in the house if they’d seen you they said no. When the police went in to look for you, they couldn’t turn anything up. I thought it was all a joke you were playing on me, one of your cruel little pranks. But you never came back. Your parents moved away. Life went on.

I know that people don’t just disappear. We invent mysteries to deal with the truth: lost hikers are eaten by bears and wolves, drunks stumbling home trip and fall into ditches. All of those cartoons we grew up watching where someone got lost in the Bermuda Triangle? Plane crashes in rough waters. Shipwrecks. Bloated bodies. But they never found yours.

I’ve been carrying you around with me for decades now, you and the hobby shop guy and the witch house and all of these memories of a town I never wanted to come back to as soon as I was old enough to get away. But something pulled me back. I give people reasons: a bad job market, aging parents, cheaper rent. I don’t say: you. But I know you’re still there, somehow. And I wish I could say I was doing this for you, to save you. But it’s for me. I can’t keep carrying the burden of you around with me. And I have to know for sure.

I reach my hand up to the brass knocker. I’m not surprised or frightened when the door swings open onto empty darkness. I know the difference between fantasy and reality. I step across the threshold.