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There used to be a diner on the corner of Sycamore and Central, before the city’s plans to install a light rail went sideways and caused enough of a disruption that most of the businesses along its path had to close. I worked there — first on soda fountain and then as a server — until I had a drunken one-night stand with a line cook and decided it was better to lose a month’s pay before starting college than deal with the fallout. The building was still there, windows papered over and vandalized and frosted where the etch bath had dripped. Idling across the street, I couldn’t help but see our ghosts balancing plates on our arms, or using a piece of cardboard to keep the back door from locking, or hotboxing and giggling in the parking lot post-close.

I drove a lot in high school. Mariana lived down in West Mesa and Abby lived up in the foothills — I avoided being home by driving to pick them up, or drop them off, or sometimes just driving the whole of Central, comforted by the neon signs advertising casinos and the Catholic pro-life billboards promising a watchful God’s wrath.

No one stayed unless they had to: I left for the northwest, Mariana the east coast, and Abby for the south. We promised we’d stay close until we each realized, independently, that doing so was life’s real aberration. With each passing year we shared fewer holiday plans, and met up for coffee instead of dinner, and learned about each other in floods instead of sprinkles.

Shifting out of park, clicking on the headlights, I kept glancing in the rear-view to see the diner’s darkened neon disappear behind a bend. I drove beside the abandoned light rail tracks, past the turn to get home and further east toward the mountains. A sea of empty storefronts lined the road, interrupted here and there by a city stronghold, playing like a zoetrope in the shadows of the streetlights. The moon hung over the mountains against the backdrop of a periwinkle sky. I watched specters of my life in parking lots and passing restaurants, and wondered at how a place could be home and never feel like it.