I.

When I think of Across the Spider-Verse, there’s a gap in my memory. I walk up to the filing cabinet. I find the key loose in my pocket. I unlock the third drawer down. I ruffle through a couple manila folders and open one up. There’s snapshots of miles and a couple smudged stills of Miguel. Almost everything about Gwen is gone.

I have only one consistent memory of Across the Spider-Verse. The recurring nightmare: I am pixelated, animated, and there I am, laying in a pile of rubble and holding my friend through his last breaths. I let out a scream in two parts, the way most onomatopeias work. Rich black hair bleeds into olive skin into gray Crocs into the blank, stark white of nothing at all. He slips out of my hands. I pick up my pastel pink phone, read a few urgent texts from our mutual friend, and the phone bleeds into my beige hand as I answer the call.

“He passed away three weeks ago.” I cry in two parts.

There’s no conclusion to Across the Spider-Verse. He’s a ghost. In the same summer that he passed, I stayed one building over, in a room identical to his. I made the mistake of watching that movie with friends who didn’t know who he was at all. I went home in four parts: one for each of my limbs that couldn’t stop shaking. For a year, I walked past his old dorm room to get to work. I took even more walks to balance it out, to try and get it off my mind, but by the time the sun set, all I saw was the pastel pink and pastel blue, the damned black and the absent hues of ‘you can’t save everyone.’

I couldn’t save him.

II.

My mom calmly asked if I wanted to leave.

I knew where she wanted to take us the moment we left the movie theater. In the gridlocked, packed cramped center of QRO, the wind that broke through layers of cotton on my shirt. As though I had never turned my tassel. As though I never watched that stupid movie.

My mom didn’t know, so I just said I wanted to stay for the spinach and feta. I stared down at the salty napkin in front of me and just drew the oak table and wood finished chairs, the planters with ivy, the ceiling light above us. Everything but us.

Right now, we are everywhere in between: Kyoto and Kent, Solon and Gotham, QRO and Cairo. An open wound along a fault line. A withering suture on the ocean floor, angler fish approaching cautiously. I am everywhere, but I am hanging out and acting posh.

The movie wasn’t stupid. This pizza would have tasted better if it was just us.

I stayed at the pizzeria, picking off the cheese first. Slowly, I gripped a cold ball of melted mozzarella and ricotta and swiveled it in between my fingers.

A couple of months later, I cry at the Murphy Auditorium because I promise myself I will live the way he never got to. The rot will not ruin my blood. The river basin will settle with impurities. I will keep on wading.

I invite C. to come with me to confront the grass and headstone. I tell her about the Spider-verse and the hole in the wall of that same pizzeria. She suggests placing a filing cabinet in front of it. A bookshelf. Anything. I tell C. over a cup of Lebanese coffee that I will now, forever, live in part two: after.