It’s my sister’s birthday today, so I’m in Houston. I’m sitting in the room that used to be my bedroom when I was in high school. It is now the computer room. Where I’m sitting used to be my television and dresser, and a floral-print couch now rests where my bed used to be. The walls have been repainted and the carpeting has changed. The only remnants of my four years in these four walls are the glow-paint on the ceiling fan blades and…

Oh, it’s gone. I just checked the wall inside my closet, the most secret part of my room, to get the exact quote of what I had written to the side of my closet door. It’s been painted over. At one point I do believe it was the phone number of a boy named Erik, who moved to California two days after telling me that he liked me. I never called his number, but it was written on my door, and I always thought somehow it’d be there, and I’d call it when we were too old to remember that I was dorky enough to write his new phone number on the inside of my closet.