It was a large room shrunken by clutter on every surface. Kane tamped down the prickling unease and began with his desk. It was a waste of half-read books and comics. There were half-filled sketchbooks and half-finished crafts. A birdhouse, half-painted, waited in a dried pool of its own colors atop some newspaper. Kane didn’t own a bird. He did own a fish, though.

“Hey Rasputin,” he said to the fishbowl. The black betta regarded him nervously, then slid behind a miniature castle.

“Me, too.” He pinched a few flakes into the bowl and tried to imagine what it was like to have your food magically appear above you, without warning. Then he thought about how he knew the fish’s name, but not where it was from.

Kane moved on to the bookcase, a heavy mahogany beast anchored to the wall because he used to climb it. Kane poked through the knickknacks on the shelves and marveled at what was probably the early signs of a hoarding habit. There were jars of shells from the Connecticut coast, ceramic mugs crammed with bristling paintbrushes, plastic superhero figurines prized from cereal boxes, dingy stuffed animals with threadbare smiles, a milky-eyed antique camera, a handful of sea glass placed meticulously into a figure eight, and books. Countless books, spines cracked and pages spotted and covers peeling and corners rounded. The titles whispered to Kane, bidding for his attention, but he resisted the urge to open up one and close himself within. That was the old Kane. The new Kane needed to focus on the real.

He ran his shaking hands over it all, searching for the holes in his memory. There were many, and without the patina of nostalgia, everything felt like junk. Useless junk.

A few tears creeped from the corners of his eyes, but he pushed them back across his temples. It was not just sadness he felt, but homesickness. He was homesick for a place he could no longer visit, for a home that was no longer his. Then his eyes fell upon the old jewelry box on the very top shelf.

It had been his grandmother’s, willed to him when she passed. It was a fitting gift. Kane had always loved to rip open the drawers when he was a toddler, taking the jewels out of their velvet coffins, until one day he managed to lose the key. His grandmother, who loved pranks, told him this meant she’d have to blow it up, jewelry and all, and start her collection over. Kane was so hysterical about it he begged his father for a hammer to crack it open. The tool was solemnly supplied and, to Kane’s delight and his grandmother’s amusement, just one tap did the trick. It wasn’t until years later that his grandmother showed him—and only him—that applying pressure to the topmost drawer’s upper-right edge opened the compartments without much fuss. The lock had never worked.