There’s an abandoned furniture manufacturing plant down the road from my friend’s apartment. I’d seen it on his Snapchat story—the view from the roof, so high up you could easily see the skyline of Greensboro, the drop seventy feet below, the shockingly detailed graffiti sprayed on the walls, the apocalyptic scenes in the shadowy halls. I’d been wanting to investigate for awhile, and the opportunity arose when another friend of mine suggested we go explore some abandoned buildings. I agreed, and we met up with my friend and headed out to the old factory.

It was dark and dusty; when a ray of sunlight poked through the busted out windows, it lit up the dust in the air and it may as well have been snow. Parts of the roof were caved in, leaving exposed piping and torn insulation out in the open, and yes, this includes the veins of asbestos revealed by the deteriorating walls and collapsed roofs. That shook me up a little, but I’m young with a good set of lungs. It was only once, anyways. I’ll be fine, right? Right?

After precariously climbing back down the creaky ladder, we delved further into the belly of the beast. We saw evidence of previous expeditions into the factory: discarded Airsoft pellets, graffiti on the walls—some crude, some elegant—, stomped on beer cans and cigarette butts, and shattered glass all over the place. Yeah, I know, that sounds unappealing, but isn’t that what makes it so appealing in the first place? There are plenty of clean, structurally sound buildings in Greensboro, but there aren’t many abandoned ones in a state of degradation and disarray.

Most of the second floor was one huge expanse, certainly where all the manufacturing machines used to live. This one huge room was bigger than a football field, maybe two. Smaller rooms branched out from this one hangar; one such room stuck out to me. I’m not sure what its purpose was before the closing, but there were two broken windows along the far wall, pouring in sunshine. The windows had been shattered years ago, because nature was reclaiming this room. Vines and bushes creeped in through the windows, snaking down the frames, down the wall, and to the floor. That struck me as… extraordinary. There wasn’t much green in this old factory—a lot of dust, a lot of debris, but very little green. Yet here it was, whipping up a comeback.

Those windows were a battlefield. The building’s defeat, of course, was inevitable. At some point, in a year, ten years, a hundred years, the sun would return to the shadows within the factory. The plants would also come then, and this building of strewn debris and toxic chemicals would succumb to nature, like everything else. To me, it was meaningful to witness this. It reminded me of fragility of human civilization, that when abandoned, the Earth would swallow us back up, like it has for 4.3 billion years. That realization was not cynical or depressing; it was enlightening. Every single person alive is part of something bigger than us, and it doesn’t take much for something to go wrong—it can be something as small as a broken window—for our planet to rightly retrieve what we took from it.