The side streets were starting to become residential. Riley hadn’t been paying that much attention during his and Matty’s visit, and he was probably going to miss the turn. He had never paid that much attention. He hadn’t wanted to. When you’re young, that’s sometimes part of how you process an experience. And then there’s a period, when you’re first leaving your youth behind, when the past seems precious and freighted with meaning, and you think you’re going to want to recover as much of it as you can, and then, a little bit later, once you’ve definitively left your youth, said goodbye to it, you find you don’t need to think about it anymore, you don’t even really want to, and you stop. And if for some reason you try to go back to it after that, so much of it is gone. - from "The Letter" by Caleb Crain via The Paris Review