There are places that disappear. Not like an illusion or a magic trick. They simply fade into the background. Like the belief, in Hispanic culture, that those no longer remembered by the living will vanish. It's why they have an offerenda to hold the pictures for those loved ones at Day of the Dead.

Too bad they don't make those kind of things for the places people forget.

Thousands of years ago families would simply move around following the food. Towns were not a worry or a care because who needed a permanent location when the food did not stay in one place? But eventually that became an unsustainable way of life and people gave it up.

Then they started building houses and only moved when nature rallied against them or war forced them out. Pogroms and cleansings mixed with economic depressions and desperation to guide people around the globe with parents telling their children these were simply them "moving to better pastures." Towns built on top of one another, growing and swelling to make the biggest cities in the world melting pots of cultures and peoples stacked on top of one another like Jenga blocks.

That's not always the case.

It used to be that when a town had no use everyone would simply move and it would be a ghost town. They say those exist in other places, places in the west where the desert reclaimed mining towns that ran out of mine, but not really here. Here the buildings rot while children pass by them, bricks crumble while families live in the house next door, and people have to deal with the reality that life continues to end around them but they have to pretend it will all be alright.

What do you do if there's nowhere to move or there's no way to move?

The people in those towns, and the towns themselves, have no choice but to simply fade. The well-intentioned try to rebuild it, stirring up hope in better days, but slowly the light fades from their dreamer's eyes. Those who stick around are those who simply don't know how to let go or are too stubborn to realize they should.

Or who simply have nowhere else to go.

This is the town I grew up in and the town I wanted to leave to see the world. But somehow still kept me in its grip. Like a black hole that continues to suck everything around it into its destructive grasp.

The town I did not know how to leave, no matter how much I wanted to.

At least, until he came.

That was when everything changed.