Alas, childhood, we hardly knew ye.

A place like that one was, all cracked plaster and stained concrete, frayed cable and sputtering lightbulbs, a place that smelled of old rubber from ancient tires, fresh urine from the homeless man who lived on the third level, a place like that is where you can really go to get away. At night, sometimes, when there was no traffic on the nearby street, no sound from the sleeping city, you could feel that you were truly alone, the last one left, the sole survivor, you know? Like everything had been wiped away, leaving only a few crumbling buildings behind, and here you were on one of them, your silhouette spasmodically convulsing on the pavement from the death throes of an ancient neon streetlight. If you took a breath, I mean a really good, deep breath, the kind that hurts your lungs just a little before you exhale, you could swear you smelled and sometimes even tasted the memory of what that place once might have been, all writhing with good taste and good business, winking her bejeweled eye at the night sky. Back when there might have been ladies dressed in the height of fashion with diamonds in their eyes being escorted by dashing young men in their coal-black tuxedos and reflective shoes, proffering a well-creased right arm to their exquisite charges, offering their jacket if it got too chilly, insisting on opening the door for the ladies and pulling out their chair and waiting until they were seated before the strapping gentlemen took their own seats. Soft fingers of jazz stroking their ears as they make the less rhythmic music of empty dinner conversation, all of it a pretext to the acquisition of more money or sex or whatever.

But all of that, now, is just a piece of what this place was, a falsehood starkly framed against the reality of her decay. The true face of the thing, her real character, is here, now, in the graffiti on the walls and the rust on the door bars. Whatever had gone here before has had no effect on the here and now; sooner or later, she would have come to this, a lonely, condemned building in the middle of a false town, an eyesore to all those who cannot appreciate the beauty of things once they are done using them up.

But one day, all of that changed; a man, dressed in a smartly crisp blue suit, chattering incessantly on his cell phone about stock options and potential net profit, took one look at the grand old lady and decided to dress her up one more time to see if she could still sing for her supper. He called his friends, they called their friends, and soon she was swarming with little worker ants, banging and groaning and sweating and violating her serene beauty with their gruff and coarse hands, making her over into something she never should have been, putting nothing more than a fresh layer of falsehood over her true nature, exhuming the dead for a last dance. They could never see what I saw. What I can still see, if I look at her with my eyes closed, standing apart from her in the parking lot after everyone has gone home for the night, taking a really good, deep breath and exhaling slowly through pursed lips, still smelling faintly the stale urine and old rubber of her perfume.

She's still there, underneath all that paint and glass. She still looks at me, sadly, from beneath the trappings of progress, and silently vows to be free again one day. To show her face again, to be nothing more or less than what she really is.

I know she'll be back. I'll wait for her.