I don’t want her to die, again and again in the elevator up, surely God will pay attention on the sixteenth refrain. I will resurrect her years later, she was a runner, as though it explains everything, in a dorm room curled on my side with my arms around his belly / 3 am in the Aegean, drunk on the top deck / an Instagram story on an odd-number anniversary. His heartbeat / those teenagers / you faceless. That day she filmed me for a project in my politics class then I turned the camera on her, cross country team quarter-zip and a grey port and a toothy grin. Then again twenty minutes later, staring out the window, lips pursed determined / fearless / afraid. I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I do my own fortune telling and I will not let her be dead.
EMB is an anthropologist and journalist.