I first arrived a few weeks shy of my twelfth birthday. I can still recall a great number of details. There was no lake, no breeze, no bats circling the air at dusk. No eight-lane highway, whose shoulder was lined with wildflowers, no cars, in fact, and nobody on the street. There would be no bus, let alone line of buses waiting by the curb, no cross bus drivers, no lunch room, no girls sharing glitter in the bathroom or boys comparing Air Jordans before the bell, but I didn’t know that yet. There was my father, his brow furrowed, waiting at the one room lounge that served as an airport, after my mother and I missed our connection in Denver due to snow. As our car glided down a silent, gray street, I knew we had arrived somewhere that had remained unchanged for a very long time, and that I would evade its fearful inevitability.