The next day, the treehouse didn’t feel the same way that it did before. We stood there at the base of the tree, broken lengths of two-by-fours and collapsed plywood lying at our feet, and there was no reverence in our silence.

“What the fuck is this?” asked Allan finally. He didn’t laugh. In fact, from the way he said it, it sounded like he’d never laughed once in his whole life.

Jake kicked at one of the boards. “It must’ve fallen apart overnight,” he said. “Wind or something.”

“Like hell, the wind. We were sitting in that thing, man. There’s no way the goddamn wind could’ve pulled it down.”

“Well, I don’t know, alright? Maybe…someone, like, did it.”

“Oh, if they did, I’ll kick their ass so hard-”

I walked to Sean. He was kneeling by the plywood roof, the one that had been intact yesterday. His eyes were busy. He looked like he was solving a puzzle without ever picking up the pieces.

“We could fix this,” he said, and looked up. “Some of these pieces are broken, but we could replace them, no problem.” He paused, like he was waiting for a response. I never gave one. He continued, “A hammer, some nails, another couple of two-by-fours and a handsaw’s all we’d need. We’d have to rebuild the base, too, but…” He smiled at me. “…it wasn’t big enough, anyway. It will be better this time, and stronger. It won’t come down anytime soon.”

I looked down at him, saw the conviction in his face and heard it in his voice, and I should’ve been convinced but I knew that he was wrong. I don’t know how I knew, exactly, but I knew he was totally wrong. I tried to think of a way to explain it, some way to tell him that the treehouse hadn’t collapsed because of neglect or vandalism or freak accident, that it had collapsed because sometimes things just fall apart, and that fixing the treehouse wouldn’t fix the problem. The problem wasn’t in the treehouse, or anywhere in the world: the problem was the world. He could rebuild the treehouse a million times and it would fall down every single time, because that’s what happens to everything someday. Trees fall down, flowers wilt, people die, nations crumble, and nobody tries to fix any of those because everyone knows that it’s impossible.

I saw all of this in my head, knew it all without being told, but I couldn’t think of how to say it so I just nodded, and when Sean got to his feet and started picking up the pieces, I started picked them up, too.