You probably had a name for yours. Maybe it was “Fred” or the unironic “Goldie.” You took the car ride home to make plans: where Fred would live, how you would share all your meals together, and never spend a second apart.

When I was younger, I attributed great size to important places. My grandparents’ condo, for example, was a labyrinth of rooms and towering ceilings. My cousins and I raced through the dark hallways like they were the Catacombs of Paris—stretching for miles, buffering the sound of our sprints and collisions with their sheer enormity.

There was a tree I liked to climb in the backyard of my childhood home. “Liked to climb,” I should say, are someone else’s words. I don’t know when they became my own, but some time between then and now I adopted the words in agreement that climbing that tree was something I liked to do and did often.