“You get on your knees and you spill your heart out.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

“Then you must move on. You have to remove yourself from their story.”

I swallowed.

“How do I spill my heart out?”

That was when she told me to send her my address and hung up. Two weeks later, I received a small box in the mail, no letter or anything accompanying it. A customs form was taped to the top, from Shanghai. Inside was, of course, this pencil.

After I spoke to Meng, I felt calmer, like I could take on the world again. I even talked to my brother, the one who had the affair. I guess we both realized we were losers and finally had something in common. He suggested I take the next semester off. Is this something that’s trending? He didn’t know anything about you. But after he suggested it, it felt right. He said he’d help convince our parents. He even said he’d loan me money if I didn’t have enough saved from my campus library job (which I definitely do not).

I still have some research funds from last year, though, so I’ve decided—I’m going to take the next semester and go to Shanghai. I won’t bother Meng again, not unless she wants to see me. In fact, I don’t think I’ll bother anyone. I need to spend some time examining my own life before I can begin trying to archive that of others.

I’ve given up on the grant I was telling you about. I thought if I had some big name and big money behind my work, my parents might be okay with me and my choices, that they might even be proud of me, talk about me the way they do my brothers. But it’s okay. I’ll find my own path.

Something you said offhandedly once really stuck with me. You told me how data is stored in servers, but how that data is owned by these big tech companies. So if they find you’ve violated a rule, they can go and delete your data, or at least make it inaccessible to you. Or if you haven’t used your account for a while, they may just delete it. And how even though our generation has more data saved than any other, we may actually leave the least behind.

That terrified me. I thought I needed that data, needed it to give myself a sense of reality.

But then you laughed.

“Do you know the actual best way to preserve data? If all humans were wiped out and eons passed, what data would survive and be interpretable?”

And I did know the answer to that one.

“That carved on rocks,” I answered.