There are parts of my brain that I can’t access without a trigger. That’s just a neutral fact. It’s neither good nor bad. It just is.

I was on Facebook just now, and there was a discussion about all the businesses we missed near where I grew up. Retail was such a part of my life there—and it was such a fleeting part—that one failed business that lasted for less than a few years becomes a touchstone for a certain time and place. It connects me to a map that exists in my head that I don’t have everyday access to.

And connecting to that map fills me with both pleasure and dread. Pleasure that I can go back to it in one, faint way and dread that, in other normal dimensions, I know I can never return. I will never go back to Pup ’n’ Taco or Wendell’s Chicken or Gemco. And the people who took me to those places—my parents—will never return.