Please Don't Die

The Email

To: ViktorHedin@une.contact.se
From: Amala Luponi (you)
Subject:

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22:23, 17-01-22

Is an omission the same thing as lying? I don't know, but it feels like I've been lying, or at the very least, been deceitful. The feature film I'm making as my graduation project, it's gone through an evolution—has been going through one for months. I've been waiting to tell you. October, Christmas, and all the weeks since. I suppose I've been waiting for the right moment, but there's no such thing, is there? In person, where I can read you better than through an email, but every time I've gotten close to saying something, my body cinches shut; the part of me that knows better, malfunctioning. There's so much from the past we don't speak about and I've decided for some reason that this belongs there. In the past. You have to admit, there's so much we don't talk about. How do I explain this without getting into all that?

Paradoxically, I've been doing a lot of explaining, to everyone but to you. I've somehow convinced Ulf Bragge—yes, Ulf—to take on this project, to see the merit in this story, to see merit in me as its director. I've been explaining why it should exist outside the confines of my head and I don't think I've once been successful in getting it across, but for some reason these people—gosh, so many amazing, talented, awe-inspiring people—have decided to gamble on me.

The film is about Mikael-Nilssen. Both the school and the youth still walking those familiar corridors. It's about our generation making sense of gen z and getting it all wrong; misdiagnosing their climate anxiety to disastrous results. It has all the elements of that now scraped idea I was telling you about last September—was it really that long ago? Yes, I checked my calendar and it was. Fuck. Remind me again why we keep trying.

I know I'll never get it across in a way that'll make sense. The main reason I've been putting it off is having to explain I haven't been well. Which is to say I haven't been doing well. I haven't been "achieving." I've been letting people down because I can't seem to face my reflection in the mirror. I dyed my hair again. Newsflash, getting dumped on your birthday makes you eligible for copious amounts of hair dye and a pair of emotional-support Chanel flats. Lol. That tangent goes deeper than I care to admit. I'd been monitoring them for months—the shoes— which is really the cherry on top, isn't it? I haven't worn them. Something about my sheer depravity scares me, but I do take them out of the box sometimes to admire the delicate pointe, the sheen of the black satin catching the light. I'll let you have this mental image of me at my lowest, clutching and whispering "my precious" to a pair of flats someone's granny wore in a past life. That's how much I love you.

Things that never appealed to me suddenly seem appealing. And if not appealing, then not outright repulsive. I find myself ambivalent. This lukewarm ambivalence. The very thing we used to hate. This bourgeoisie tolerance and detachment mixed with a vulgar overindulgence. I hate how much it reminds me of who I was before Mikael-Nilssen. I'm watching myself in retrograde, and the real me, maybe the idea you still have of me which I don't feel like I'm living up to, lives there in the past.

We don't realise what a special school it was. I say 'we,' but you probably do. They probably never let you forget it, their hands to their mouths, their scandalized gasps. How many of those does one need to encounter to realise it was an institution like no other? Did I know at fifteen when I was filling out the form? Did you? I suppose I knew it differently from you. I knew I'd make "friends for life"—&remember that mantra?—but I never once breached the point of realising who those friends would be.

I didn't have opinions prior to Mikael-Nilssen. Not the kind of opinions you raised your hand for in class. Not the kind you and Perry espoused; the sort that came with intricate knowledge about how the world works. The sort of thinking that children absorb granted they're around adults whose opinions they respect. Nothing about the state of the world warranted my opinion before Nilssen. If anything,  I think, a testament to my folks who survived by keeping their heads down. Your parents never had to fear their immigration status being revoked, getting evicted, losing jobs they got under iffy circumstances. You grew up believing it was your right to have an opinion on everything. Before a time I'd met you, those convictions had already reached me by way of your social media presence.

This is another side of the coin we toss but never examine more closely. You and Perry. I've been trying for the past few weeks to explain the idea of "super teenagers" to Celia and Jack who're in charge of the talent. I don't think they get it. Very few can. Remember when your dad made a call and we never heard another complaint about Film Club? Not specifically that, but those instances remind you of what an insular, self-governing ecosystem we existed in. All the things that would've gotten us kicked out at a "normal" high school, but because Nilssen doesn't oust their own, we got away with. That's what I want to explain.

What does it feel like to be swept by a cohort of intellectually curious, politically fierce, superstars? What does it feel like as one's world is changing in ways incomprehensible to the adults around them? When things are happening at the microscale only to have macroscale ramifications? This is what I want to explore and I understand I can't do that without the obvious parallels being drawn between our work. This is where my doubts and fears set in.

You came up in a conversation with Ulf. I suppose you know you can't Google Mikael-Nilssen these days without getting some link directing to a review of your biography. This is a bad time to confess that I read it and an even worse time to tell you everything it still means to me; the paragraphs underscored, the pages annotated, the lines I sometimes recite by heart. I won't. He wanted to know if we knew each other. Same graduation year. I didn't know if I should laugh or cry. I can't remember a time when you weren't eclipsing my world.

My problem these days is that I can, though—I am. I'm forgetting. The time we clogged the toilets and flushed until the bowls overflowed. Perry's marching orders now faint, your grin fainter, and the fear of vomiting from nerves not there at all. I barely remember what that year felt like; just the clearest memory of you quitting school and showing up on a random Thursday in your PJs for a screening of The Blue Lagoon. It hurts like a gaping, oozing cavity. I can no longer remember what being intimate with a man feels like. The women I've been with have been just warm enough to hold on to past the point they've stopped loving me, and I've grown a knack for poking holes in every promising new policy by absorbing the nihilism around me.

I've become everything I disdained. I'm evaporated. I live, but my existence is marred by looming social collapse. I watch films and waste away, all the while, the seas are overflowing and the land is paradoxically drying. I'm living in a Black Mirror episode where my survival depends on my refusal to think about the future. I understand the kids glued to their pocket-sized slot machines. I honestly do because I, too, am being swallowed by the anxiety of it all; paralyzed with apathy.

How can I not write about the environment that made us? No, really, I've asked myself this repeatedly—mostly as a way to arm wrestling myself out of committing to it. It's the only time I really knew myself; what I wanted, what I stood for, what I tolerated. I can't bear the idea that you might hate me for it.

I wanted to tell you in person, to really know—and I'd know instantly, wouldn't I? There's no hiding with you—what you feel as you take in this information. I'd see it on your face, and somehow I'd learn to live with it. How I'd do it, I don't know. I suppose the same way I've lived with your story out in the world for this long. The same way I live with everything that's happened. It wouldn't be the same type of existence, but it would be something I can forge proudly, knowing I've stayed true to myself and to our friendship.

I love you. You know that, right? And I'd never do anything to intentionally hurt you—I don't believe you would either. But we're past the point of pretending we've not been hurt. I'm well past it. I love you and I hope you can still care for me knowing we might never escape the murmurs, the parallels, the thinly veiled barbs. I wish we can stand united knowing the context from which we create. Knowing when I first met you outside classroom 31, handing out homemade cinnamon buns, I met everything I long suspected the world might be for other people but never was for me—until you. You, Mikael-Nilssen, and the club were a portal to my humanity. I can't yet tell if you are or if you've given me my raison d'être. Either way, I wish there was a more ironic way of typing that without sounding any 402-mental-health alarms. I'm fine, I promise. I just. I really fucking couldn't bear it if this—this—after all we've been through is the thing