I wait for some intruder alarm to go off, a siren to start blaring. But there’s nothing. Only the deep, dark silence of an empty, neglected house.

I’m in the kitchen, and it’s a glimmering, hazy afterthought of a memory, but it’s there, sitting at a table in this room, spilling applesauce on its hardwood top. Definitely not this table, a modern monstrosity of chrome and metal, but a table in this same place.

I spot a phone on a counter and breathe a sigh of relief before tiptoeing around the room, taking in the shiny new appliances, the tiled floor. It’s like an uncanny valley of a room, almost exactly how I remember it, but an updated remake version. I take out my camera and snap a shot. I open the cabinets, too, gingerly at first, still afraid that someone is going to jump out and tell me to get the fuck off their property. But the longer I stand there, poring over the imperishables—canned beans, Campbell’s soup—the more absurd that idea becomes. So I leave the room and start wending my way through others.

It’s the oddest sensation, walking through these halls, like I’m exploring the body of a stranger who has a loved one’s donated organs. I can sense all the turns, where one hall or room leads to the next, but it’s all a little off-kilter, out of scale, shrunken in size. The stairs seem like a miniature set, from Barbie’s DreamHouse, not the giant ziggurat I remember. Which of course makes sense. I was only three feet tall last time I was here.

I continue onward, toward the master bedroom. This room must have been where my mother died. But looking around at the wallpaper of rose trellises, the neatly folded peach linen atop the king-sized bed, I don’t feel a thing. No painful urge to kneel and pray, to look in the bathroom mirror and try to find her in my face, pretend it’s thirty years earlier and I am she filling out my eyebrows. There’s no character in this room. It’s not my mother’s decor anymore, for sure.

There are four more rooms on the far side of the floor, and I make my way toward them. The first is another bedroom, a bit smaller, with a bay window overlooking the lake. I study the layout, the closet on the left when you walk in, a small bathroom tucked away in the corner. Everything is white, or a bland oatmeal color.

But my eyes sting with recognition anyway, and an acute sensation of loneliness washes over me, a need to be held. This was my room. I remember the window, so much less commanding than in my memory, and the far right corner that has a molding with a deep profile where a right angle should be.