We watched a barn burn down on the same day that my grandmother sent me a message telling me, you make your own happiness. We’d been driving for hours, closer to the border but not yet there, when we saw it. A single barn licked with flame in the middle of a field. There were so many barns we’d passed that had been long abandoned. Fields gone fallow, left to seed.

We’d talked about it: how many farms around here had been sliced in half by highways, home on one side and livelihood on the other. Those highways we no longer needed quite as much. It reminded me of something a friend had once said, reading an article about war, we are a world who keeps cutting ourselves into smaller pieces.

The barn was old, some parts caved in, though we couldn’t tell if that was from the fire or from time. We stopped the car, got out, walked closer and closer. We wanted to see the damage, or I did and assumed. How close we got without feeling the heat.

Once, as a child, I’d played hide-and-seek with myself. I wanted to know how long I could stay away, enclosed, before I gave up and ran out into the light. I tucked myself in the corner of my mother’s closet, the heaviest of her dresses hung against me. At some point, I fell asleep, only waking when my mother grabbed me into her arms. We looked everywhere for you, we thought you were lost. And as I hugged her, suddenly scared, suddenly filled with the thought of what it would be like to be lost, away, I said, I’m still here.

The flames crept through the barn, seemed to know where they wanted to be, keeping themselves contained to rafters, then to walls, as if to slow the inevitable ending. Should we call someone, we wondered. But who would we call? We hadn’t had phone signals for hours, hadn’t passed anyone else for miles.

Years ago, we got married in a forest clearing, our friends played music we danced to. The cake was chocolate and raspberries, vanilla and lingonberry. There were things we agreed on without talking about them. How sour and sweet always had been our favorite combination. How sleeping under the stars was like being on a spaceship, going someplace unknown and far away and somehow still so comfortable. How when we reached out to touch one another, we always kept our pinkies interlocked a second longer than the other fingers.

We leave before the barn falls in, before the aftermath. Inevitability has never been as beautiful as the possibility of something not happening. This might not come to pass. You might never not feel this. The world might not end. In the car, we hold hands for a second, and then drive on. We sing a song we both know the lyrics too. The sound bounces around us. The road is empty. We make noise to fill it, our own happiness an out of key duet, in the silence from all sides.

Chloe N Clark is the author of Collective Gravities, Your Strange Fortune, the forthcoming Escaping the Body, and more. Find her on Twitter @PintsNCupcakes.