Please Don't Die

Her Viktor

No.

The answer to the unspoken question in Amala's mind as she watches Celia dig in her tote bag for her phone.

The coat of lipstick on her lips feels thicker than it did seconds ago. The ever-present camera in her mind zooms in. Under the amber lights of the tram stop, she's its primary focus: an 18x24 shot of her, slightly out of centre.

Celia barely grazes the frame, just enough to make a point to the voyeur—this isn't where Amala wants to be. As the seconds pass, another, more minute detail, is communicated through the lens as she stands immobile save for her imperceptible attempts to keep warm in the frigid evening. Amala's been here before. The way her head moves to take in the people tumbling out of cramped trams and jostling their way to their next connection. This is familiar terrain to her.

"Are you sure?" Celia asks, glancing down at the journey planner.

Amala's smile is languid. "Are you sure you'll be okay?" Her tone is teasing. She checks the time on her cracked phone, giving away another piece of identity to the voyeur in her mind and to Celia, who snorts dismissively.

"Go on. I don't want to keep you waiting."

"I know. You've said that a hundred and fifteen times already."

"I'm not the one who's been in a state all day. Goodness, if it's a date, just say so. What's with the hush-hush? Go on. Watching you is making me freeze. Go!"

The laughter of someone who definitely didn't finish their lunch for fear of throwing it up fills the space between them. "Okay," Amala says, conceding to her taller German counterpart. "I'll be on my way then. See you next week, yeah? Take care. Text me if there's anything."

***

No, she supposes not all people watch themselves watching themselves. To be fair—to give her declining mental health a fighting chance—the camera isn't always there. It's rearing its head now because of the notes she's been pored over ahead of shooting. Now when there's just three weeks between her and directing Amira Malik, the eighteen-year-old Bengali -Swedish girl who's been cast as her younger self.

The trouble is, Amala can't with any accuracy remember the person that went to Mikael-Nilssen all those years ago, and what arises instead is a constant comparison between her present self and the imagined past. Just yesterday she was laughing at an absurd study of how she pulled open the door to Espresso House. The weight of her hand on the door handle—had she always done it that way?

This back-and-forth comparison follows her as her bike flies down the bicycle lane from Järntorget, where she's left an anxious Celia, down the gravelled avenues of Kungsparken, lined with the naked canopies of 100-something year-old trees, to Magasingatan.

How many times has she not in the past eight years travelled up and down this stretch on her bike, in a car, on a tram? Texting, talking on her phone, with an ice-cream cone in her hand? Just this morning between errands with a steaming travel mug of coffee? How can one possibly extricate oneself as to become two people; only one of them aware of what awaits the other? Only one of them able to turn to the other and say: Yes, the anxiety in the pit of your stomach is warranted. If he loves you, he loves you in a way that'll always be incomprehensible to you.

She shakes her head—not managing to shake the camera that follows her as she parks her bike against one of the million bike stands in the city. This one between 7-Eleven and Pedagogen.

A shade lighter than her usual lipstick shade takes the brunt of her nervousness as it smears thinner and thinner between her lips. It's a ghastly peach colour, far from the ruby red that has become emblematic of her post-Carina look. Carina, who was the last of a string of girlfriends that combined have lasted less than her twelve months in film school. If she allows it, it can quickly turn into a self-flagellation session—the lipstick, yes, but more so the depthless void accompanying the mere thought of the breakup, and how this venture into a new lipstick shade is a sad, flimsy attempt at self-preservation.