To: Shruti Patel, 2007. I wrote to her, as I always do, about the day-to-day rhythms of my life at a given moment. I write until it leads back to her, as it always does. I told her I was sitting in North Georgia, near the place where she and I had been on a field trip during her first years in America. I told her about Prachi’s wedding, about Manu leaving California to try to make Georgia a better home, about how little Anita and I still understood about how to make use of all we’d taken, but about how we were trying to figure that out these days. About how it seemed the most important question we could set our minds to.

I told her she would have been good at journalism, which was still new and intimidating to me, or at coding, which stumped Anita every day. I wrote to her about how the hardest thing about adulthood, for her, would not have been work, or money, or even making friends, or finding love—she would have met her tribe in college or graduate school, I was sure. You would have had to forgive people, if you’d gone on, I wrote. You would have had to believe that idiots grow up and change. You would have had to be big enough to accept that, or the bitterness might have eroded you. But you would have. You would have found a way to be generous to everyone who was never generous to you. You would have figured out that thing historians and politicians and all the world today is struggling with—the moral weight of the past, how to hold it.

I finished, signing as I always do: I’m sorry, still sorry, will never not be sorry, your friend, Neil.

I shut the notebook and got back in the car.

The historic downtown area was all kitsch and crowds. Pink-skinned people, turkey legs in hand; children on parents’ shoulders, faces painted and stickered. All around, the jangling sounds of the Dahlonega Gold Festival, and the burst of the summer green foliage.

A man on a stage in high boots and Levi’s was narrating a drama. “That gold fever, kids,” he was telling his audience of open-mouthed children, “it just gets into ya and it won’t leave ya. It’s always there.” A family band strummed banjos. People were clapping and dancing beneath the early June sunshine, elbows linking elbows. A few women in laced faux corsets and men in panners’ trousers meandered, passing out brochures for gold hikes and ghost tours. The day, terribly easy. History on everyone like a shrugged-on costume.

Peals of children’s laughter behind me, as an older sister chased her brother. He toppled, and a decked-out miner raced to help him up, offering the handle of his pick, and life persisted like this, blithe.