I miss my life I miss my school and the upper east side's clean-smelling air smell and the lagoon in the park with the ducks and the awkward turtles.
I miss seeing people who seemed to want me too.
I miss the delusion of Home that it gave me.
Hogwarts has smouldered to the ground.
Ashes remain. I am the sole witness.

If a way of life is destoyed so thoroughly that none remember or want to discuss it, does it make a sound?
Did it exist?
Where are the fossils?
Where lay the bones of my people; the memorial where I might mourn?
My people is destroyed, not by war or catastrophe but by disbanding.
The bodies got up and walked away.  
Every body.
And they left me.
A refugee of a small island on the upper east side, devoid of all but the wrong colors.

Did it make a sound? The cupcakes, the makeup tips, the old laughter that rang out so strong and alive, the boyfriend meets, the icky sticky breakups, the tears that soaked carpets and shirts; did they make a sound? Was it real? Did it happen?

What if everyone in the entire United States— the rich and the poor and the homeless and the homophobes and the bishops and the jews and the blacks and reds and browns and off-whites, the free and the chained and the strong and the weak and the wicked and the frail— what if everyone from everywhere in every condition and age, decided that it was time to go?
And they all packed their trunks with their money and their clothes and left their houses and apartments and benches and suburbs and farms and faiths and bonds behind them to reinvent their persons and seek some Great Perhaps,
And what if you were, maybe not the President, but maybe, the Secretary of State.
And what if you loved this country, and what we are, or were, and what we have, or rather had, and anyway you refused to move on?
And what if you showed up to work one day in that big old stone White House and there was nobody, no guards, no staff, no statesmen or dems or GOPs or GEDs or SUVs or XYZs, no nothing. 

And you call out to see if anyone still believes, and wants to save what you have- er, had, and remember what you've did, and look at all the dusty dead presidents posing in the yearbook with the same respect and reverence and intrigue and humor that you did last Thursday.

Or was it three months ago? I know it was a Thursday.
Or at least I think it was.
Maybe it was a Friday??

What if your apathy and lonliness at your situation made you forget how long ago that holy Thursday was?

And what if the lonliness made you try and see what the whole Business of Leaving was really all about, and you left?  
And what if you came back, and new "americans" had filled all that dead empty space. All strange people who'd just arrived, who never had seen or thought about the place when you were in it.  
And what if they "knew" what America stood for and they honored the same dead presidents, and they strove for the same things that you wanted to keep and create, but they were doing it all Wrong.
And what if you saw one of them at your desk, doing your work, sitting in your little  room, which is now painted the wrong color, with the furniture in all the wrong places.
And what if you realized that this "america" is America now, and there's nothing that can change it, or ressurect It, or recreate the Old Counntry that is no more.  
And you suddenly realize as you walk down the hallway of momentous portraits in that big white stone house, that you are just annother dead president.
A living dead president.  
Who was never even a proper president.
And can never ever try again to be a proper president, or even a humble resident.

What if all that came true.

What would you do?