This is place This is not a place of honour.

words by kieran guimond

illustration by chelsey wang

In the summer of 2019, my friend and I broke into an abandoned building.

Maybe saying we ‘broke in’ is a bit of an exaggeration; there was a piece of the fence that was busted. We crawled under it and from there you could walk into the building.

There was one section where you had to climb down a ‘ladder’—which was really just a grate that someone had placed at the top of the hole. Looking back, it probably wasn’t that dramatic—a short drop into a lower section—but at the time, I felt like I was discovering an entirely new world. We were brave-hearted adventurers traversing where no one had ever been before—if you could ignore the heaps of empty beer cans on the floor.