A childhood memory may survive longer than the building where it happened.

Buildings come down, streets get rebuilt, the shop becomes something else. Meanwhile a particular afternoon in a room that no longer exists is still fully present in someone’s head, complete with the light and the smell. Memory outlasts the material world with surprising regularity.

If a place from your past is gone, the loss is real and the memory is not diminished by it. And if a place still stands, it is worth going back once while you can. Either way, the version you carry is not a lesser copy of somewhere real, it is the part that lasted.