The one on the bypass back home
where we had countless birthday parties
in the playroom with the plastic tunnels and slides
leading to the mesh-encased ball pit at the end
was nothing like what we saw
in the city so ancient a Burger King lived
on the ground floor of a building
older than our entire country,
and the more I think about it,
it shames me to believe
we could not even leave the playroom
intact for thirty years,
choosing instead to discard everything
before it had the chance to age into anything
other than a minor revision of what came before
we decided our history did not matter anymore.