Dear Wigleaf,

In the past year, my world has been small. I wander Gettysburg's sprawling graveyard, tooling around on a bicycle, tracing a circle from Barlow's Knoll to Culp's Hill.

I've often felt like a ghost. If I am a ghost, what have I done to be tethered to this town, its Neo-Confederate sports bars, 3 Percenter flags and armed militias? What exactly is my unfinished business?

My partner and I walked the ruins of an abandoned minigolf course. A plaque marks the parking lot as an underground railroad stop, mentions a mill that no longer exists. What we saw was artificial turf, artificial caves, a shed spray-painted, OK Boomer. A cave entrance said Candy this way. I felt like I'd walked through spider webs, like something soaked in that I couldn't get off.

On hikes, we often hear gunshots, rarely see the gunmen. But once we came upon men with sawed-off shotguns, something strange in the curve of their smiles. And back at the car, through the trees, we could see a three-story building that hadn't been there on the way up. We drifted in its direction, past a no-trespassing sign, and came upon a cluster of homes and a penned goat that wouldn't stop staring.

It sometimes feels like we live simultaneously in the past and future. I teach via computer screen, buy kraut from the barrel sold by a teen in a bonnet. Maybe it's American life that is itself ghostly, stuck in the past, and without future.

-    Matt Greene