Nothing could have prepared me for what I see on my walk to Chapman’s. The Joker riding again. He rode all the way from New Hampshire in the snow and cold on his tiny bike with the big wheel to continue his campaign of terror and confusion against me. This is not possible. I don’t react. I just look in disbelief at the little blue house across the street from our apartment building. The one where Chico, a childhood friend, broke his wrist after a raucous game of hide-and-seek. The too-big silver bracelet sliding right off his awkwardly turned hand. Chico was hiding in the closet. Came jutting out in a flash, tripping over his father’s work boots, landing hard on his right hand, his wrist buckling, then cracking under the weight of gravity pulling him down. This is the same house we went ghost hunting in when Chico’s family moved out a few years later and it stood abandoned and hollow. And the one the city tore down two years ago after drug dealers moved in and turned it into a trap house.

Standing.

I must not have seen it when I came home late the other night. Not only standing—renewed. Shining, like Ladles with the same celestial glow. Freshly painted baby blue with white trim again.

I walk up the stairs of the porch and peek through the windows. Empty, but new inside. Sparkling hardwood floors and windows. I turn the doorknob. Surprisingly the door creaks open. I slowly enter and begin swinging through memories. Playing video games in the living room for hours, washing dirt off our hands after making mud cakes in the backyard, and licking the cake spoon when Chico’s mother makes one of her famous chocolate cakes. It all comes flooding back.

I suddenly have an overwhelming urge to be a kid again. Carefree and without the pressures of almost-adulthood. It was easy then. There was a kind of freedom. We just didn’t know it. We were all in a rush to be adults. We were convinced that once we didn’t have to do what our parents told us, we would be liberated. We didn’t know that life, for most of us, is a never-ending cycle of doing things you don’t want to do, but have to, and that freedom is like the rain. Sometimes it’s there. Most of the time it’s not. Obligation is the defining state of being for adults. I shake my head at our naiveté, at our rush to stand in these cells of obligation.