My husband first conceived of his Jewish death app on a June afternoon in 2022, about five minutes into a visit at the Praça do Comércio.

It was our first day as tourists in Lisbon, and we had strolled the path parallel to the city’s harbor, before pausing at the large, square-shaped plaza. We had not read anything in advance about the plaza and initially only noticed how it seemed oddly vacant, as if all the tourists in Lisbon operated on synched schedules and could be found en masse either taking selfies with the peacocks at the São Jorge castle crowning the top of the city or crammed onto Tram 28 clown car style to tour the historic core. Perhaps that’s why it didn’t take long for me to succumb to a vision of a Jew in ragged medieval garb being dragged to his execution.

I grabbed my husband’s arm. “Don’t you think this was prime real estate for the Inquisitors? I mean, can’t you see how this place practically screams ‘auto-da-fé?’’’

My husband performed an eye roll. It figured that his wife had to get all Jewy on an otherwise perfectly non-sectarian trip to Europe. But as I pointed at the center of the plaza and asked him if he could imagine Jewish heretics burning at the stake, his eye roll morphed into an entrepreneurial gleam. “There should be an app for this,” he said and rubbed his hands together in the style of an evil cartoon magician.

“Hah,” I said. “Morbid.”

As we traversed the perimeter of the plaza and observed the multiple storefronts peppered with flyers for tours to the Sintra palace, my husband sketched out a business plan. Most people, my husband reasoned, associate the Holocaust with Europe serving as the world’s largest graveyard for Jews in general and for Jews who perished by violence and persecution specifically. His app, in contrast, would target the American Jewish tourists walking by this crowning architectural landmark of a plaza in Lisbon or cutting through a cobblestone square in Madrid with similar bad-for-the-Jews undercurrents, or touring small, rustic villages in France and Germany, where marauding Crusaders stopped off on their way to the Holy Land. As they pause to take selfies and ooh and aah over how much of Europe resembles Disneyland, these Jewish tourists might suddenly find themselves on high alert for no logical reason. But if they had a Pre-1933 Murdered Jews of Europe app, they could verify whether their sensing of sinister ancestral vibes stems from historical truths. They could simply plug in their current location, and voila, the Jewish history of the site would unfold, replete with detailed descriptions of any church/state-sanctioned executions, spontaneous mob killings, blood libels, etc.

“There’s totally a market for this,” said my husband, who fired off an input-seeking text to his brother. My husband’s brother, an Orthodox Jew, attended March of the Living trips to Poland twice, but otherwise had historically displayed zero interest in traveling through Europe. He told my husband to ask our 20-year-old nephew, who majored in computer science. Immediately, my husband texted our nephew, who proposed an immersive, interactive component to the app. Maybe the app could allow users to travel back in time, VR style, where they become Jewish citizens of 16^th or 17^th century Portugal. Whatever you do, make it graphic, our nephew suggested.

My husband congratulated himself at the findings of his ad hoc focus group. “See? I think this has legs.”

“Glad you’re amusing yourself. But hey, it’s nice to see you take an interest in something Jewish for a change.” I said this with the calculation that my husband would drop the subject. My husband and I shared an Orthodox Jewish upbringing, yet inhabited a kind of mixed marriage, where my continued practice of many religious and/or cultural traditions co-existed and occasionally clashed with his professed atheism and consistent blaming of organized religion for what ails and dooms humanity.

“Hah, that’s not what this is,” said my husband. “It’s just a good idea for an app.”

We decided against ordering a port or coffee at one of the plaza’s sparsely populated cafes and headed for the narrow, hilly streets of the Alfama. I gave the square one final, backward glance and thought I understood why I had wanted my husband to drop the subject. I didn’t need an app to further elucidate what had transpired here. It was enough to feel it in my bones, all the European spaces where the past seeped into the present, and how this particular place produced a skeletal chill that clashed with the afternoon heat simmering on my skin.

****

We returned home that summer to Los Angeles, where layers of history might be glimpsed in the La Brea Tar Pits, but not so much in strip mall architecture and boxy mansions built on the ruins of 1940’s bungalows, and where we only thought about dead Jews during a graveside funeral at a cemetery near LAX for a distant relative on my husband’s side. Instead of bolstering his business plan with actual market research, my husband simply cracked intermittent, poor-taste jokes about the lucrative potential of his future app. An app about dead Jews isn’t only for Jews, antisemites will love it too! But one day, I realized that I had never googled “Praça do Comércio” and “Inquisition,” so convinced that I had absorbed the plaza’s history by osmosis. The first search result was an image of a 17^th century engraving of the plaza featuring clerical enforcer types bearing torches and crosses and a crowd gawking at a man tied to a fiery stake. The title of the engraving read: “Method for burning those condemned by the Inquisition.”

I showed the image to my husband, who became newly motivated and resolved to do more app research focused on pre-20^th century, Western European Jewish murder sites. Knock yourself out, I told him, but I had my doubts. What was another curated product about Jewish trauma going to do for the Jews, or for that matter, the world?

And yet: When I started a new semester of graduate school that fall, I found myself conducting ad hoc market research with my classmate Emma during a 15-minute break from our trauma and grief therapy class. She was the only other Jewish person in my counseling psychology cohort, and I knew from previous conversations that she was about 17 or 18 years younger than me, grew up in a progressive, Reform Jewish household, only observed Yom Kippur when she felt like it, and had a wonderful time on her free Birthright trip to Israel.

“So, what do you think?” I asked her after my pitch, though I kind of already knew her answer from the way she stared at me with wide eyes and pursed lips.

“That’s kind of dark,” she said.

“It is, but if you really think about it, it’s a viable 21^st century way of keeping history alive.”

“Yeah, but why bring people down like that when they’re on vacation? Personally, my Jewish identity is about so much more than all that depressing history.”

Lucky you. I thanked Emma for her feedback and secretly slapped her with the label of Shiny, Happy Jew. This was of course unfair of me since I didn’t really know Emma’s Jewish particulars, but I could still picture it: She was someone who voluntarily attended a Reform Jewish temple for occasional Friday night services, where she joyfully learned upbeat, gender-affirming Debbie Friedman songs, and where Holocaust education took a back seat to tikkun olam acts of volunteering in non-denominational soup kitchens and marching against police brutality.

“I’d love to go to Europe though…I’m such a foodie.”

Emma and I proceeded to have a conversation about the superiority of European produce compared with American fruits and vegetables and the importance of eating organic. Emma couldn’t understand why some people eat conventional, pesticide-laden berries and celery and quite frankly, those people scared her, and she certainly would never date any of them. Emma’s disappointment in all the people she would never date reminded me that while I sometimes enjoyed conversing with her, I would probably continue to sidestep overtures to socialize outside of school.

After that, a year went by where Emma and I only referenced our shared Jewishness to wish each other happy Chanukah and Passover and I became too busy with school to conduct market research with other Jews. But I figured they existed somewhere, those who might feel a stronger connection than Emma with the murdered Jews of Europe before 1933, and who might think that what my husband proposed wasn’t so morbid after all.

****

“She’s a low-tier antisemite. But how would you know that since you’re not on social media?”

It’s February 2024 and Emma and I are standing by the bathrooms nearest our human sexuality counseling classroom for our 10-minute break. Since the start of my last semester in graduate school, Emma has been policing my interactions with all the people she has ghosted and/or who have ghosted her. Today, the low-tier antisemite in question is our classmate Jasmine and how could I continue to sit next to her in class week after week and engage in collegial chit-chat, knowing what I now know?

“You’re right Emma, I’m not on social media and maybe you shouldn’t be either.”

Emma sighs and shakes her head. She doesn’t need to remind me that she can’t afford to not be on social media; that fighting antisemitism is now her full-time job and that if we weren’t so close to getting our goddamn master’s degrees, she would drop out of school in solidarity with the Israeli student a year behind us who’s taking a leave of absence.

“You know that Jasmine unfollowed me early on,” she says, referring to the brief period in October before Israel’s incursion into Gaza.

I nod and listen to Emma’s repetition of last week’s diatribe, about how antisemitism in our counseling psychology grad program operates like garden landscaping, layer cakes, and the Indian caste system. Jasmine is a low-tier antisemite because she invariably likes social media posts about genocidal Jews and Jewish settler-colonialism. Pamela is a mid-tier antisemite because she both likes and offers hand-wringing comments on posts about how all Jews everywhere are simply terrible people and how some even smell like actual garbage. But Kristin and Dana—those classmates are top-tier antisemites and not only because they’re the ones actively posting that Jews smell like garbage and other antisemitic content that generates all the likes and comments from the lower and middle tiers.

“Do you understand now why I didn’t come to class for almost a month? And how it feels when I watch you chat with Jasmine?”

I take a second to register Emma’s anger, distress, and unmet expectations she seems to have of me and remind myself that more than one thing can be true at the same time. This is what our professors love to remind us future licensed therapists, especially in classes about counseling couples and families in possession of divergent and conflicting narratives. With each professorial and platitudinous reminder, I invariably want to scream back: GOOD LUCK TELLING THAT TO THE FUCKING WORLD!

“I’m sorry, that sucks,” I finally say and decide to throw Emma another bone. “I’m curious, what else makes Dana and Kristin top-tier antisemites?”

“Because they also post about calling out therapists who are Zionists and how they’re going to screen out potential clients if they detect Zionist beliefs.”

I could have simply noted the irony of both Kristin and Dana doing their traineeships at a counseling agency founded and still mostly funded by Jews. Instead, I say, “Hmmm. Didn’t you tell me the other week that you’re not going to work with clients who might be antisemitic?”

“That’s different.”

I glance at my phone. We’re four minutes past our break and we will now need to slink into class together so our classmates can stare at their two Jewish cohort members, who not only suck at punctuality but are clearly plotting to take over the world. I decide against asking Emma how it’s “different” and start walking back to class.

“They see you as the good Jew and me as the bad Jew. You’ll talk to them like everything is cool.”

Bitch. I’m no Nazi collaborator. Clearly, you don’t know me. I take the bait and pause, but as always, I fail at the art of lightning-quick, perfect responses to passive-aggressive digs.

“I don’t think everything is cool,” I finally say.

I walk into class alone, where the professor has resumed her lecture on whether sex addiction should be labeled an “addiction.” My classmates only briefly glance at me before resuming texting, Amazon shopping, and social media scrolling from the cover of their laptops. I return to my seat and think that if anything, my classmates mostly other me for being a middle-aged woman who never watched porn in middle school and avoids social media not primarily because of politics, but because she hated social media even during the halcyon age when people largely waxed solipsistic about their preferred breakfast cereal. In my day, college students could only daydream, pass handwritten notes, and whisper to each other as the professor droned on. In my day, we didn’t have social media and upheld antisemites to higher standards. We didn’t think everyone was Hitler.

When Emma returns to class some 20 minutes later, I refuse her attempts at eye contact. From my seat, I can sense her insatiable longing for connection, and while I don’t exactly feel guilty for my inability to feed her need, her palpable loneliness awakens my sympathy. Before October 7, Emma had marched, advocated, and socialized with fellow members of a racial and economic justice group. She had considered those people good friends, until they asked her to renounce the State of Israel. Those people no longer invite her to dinner at farm-to-table restaurants and have unfollowed her on social media.

I watch Emma settle into her seat and something about her slumped shoulders and grim facial expression triggers a memory of Portugal and how I felt standing in the Praça do Comércio as I communed with its Inquisitorial past. And then I remember: I had unsuccessfully pitched my husband’s app idea to Emma in the fall of 2022.

Now, I wonder about Emma’s relationship to those ancestral vibes that flooded me while roaming around the famous Portuguese plaza. While the Holocaust hadn’t composed the entirety of my Jewish upbringing, I had first visited Yad Vashem as a 10-year-old and spent innumerable childhood Saturdays at an Orthodox shul, where I sat behind three older women, all with tattoos on their forearms. Certain prayers connected to martyrdom, persecution, and other forms of Jewish suffering during the Yom Kippur service always made me cry. And while I eventually stopped fasting on the Ninth of Av, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, I still felt an annual compulsion to peruse the English translation of Lamentations and imagine myself a daughter of Jerusalem, my skirts filthy with the blood and excrement of violent exile as I wept and watched the Romans cart out the menorah and other treasures from the Holy Temple. Sure, maybe I once thought that we might ease up on all the Holocaust movies or hoped that Jews would collectively evolve to become less neurotic due to finally enjoying greater distance from intergenerational trauma. But I was never a Shiny, Happy Jew.

Did this make me better equipped to survive the present moment?

I join my much younger classmates in using my laptop for non-academic purposes and make notes on how my husband can expand upon his still imaginary Pre-1933 Murdered Jews of Europe app. When you learn about what happened at the various sites, you have to go way beyond how many died and how it happened. There should be names, details of lives lived, complex portraits of individuals who once walked the earth.

****

On the last day of our human sexuality counseling class, Emma follows me out of the classroom for our 10-minute break. “Are you going to the hooding ceremony?”

“I am.” I then tell Emma I’m going to the café inside the university’s library to order a tea.

Emma walks with me to the library. “I heard Dana won the vote to be the student speaker.” She addresses me in an accusatory tone, as if I voted for Dana.

“I take it you’re not going?”

“Why would I want to sit there with a bunch of antisemites?”

I nod and quicken my pace. I wait to be lectured on how I’m betraying the Jewish people by attending a graduation ceremony for my midlife master’s degree.

But Emma diverts, albeit slightly. Did I see the demonstration on my way to class? She had wanted to go and counter-protest but arrived on campus too late.

I told her that I had passed by and that it all seemed rather standard-issue, with most of the placards and posters calling for the abolishment of the Zionist-colonial entity without spilling into people-specific slurs. “Compared to what we’ve been reading about on other college campuses, it looked pretty tame to me.”

“Mmmm.” Emma’s phone beeps and she slows her pace to answer a text. I walk ahead to the café and get in line. Immediately, I notice the hand-holding couple several people ahead of me. They look like grad students in their mid-20’s, and if someone held a gun to my head and forced me to check a box for their race/ethnicities, I’d mark both as white. The woman has chin-length, dark hair with purple highlights and the man has shoulder-length, dirty blond hair and a well-maintained goatee that enhances his beachy, ethereal aura (if Jesus was a surfer). They are also decked out in matching brown and navy kaffiyehs, perhaps because they attended the recent campus demonstration, but not necessarily.

“Sorry, that was my ex-boyfriend.” Emma has joined me in the line. “What were you saying before?”

I shrug. “The same things we always seem to be talking about.” And then I zone in on my classmate’s large, gold Jewish star necklace and matching Jewish star earrings. She had started going all out with the Jewish jewelry several weeks ago. “I’m doing my part,” she had told me then, while staring at my bare neck and silver hamsa earrings from Istanbul with reproach.

Now, I see that Emma has noticed the couple in front of us. I watch her eyes grow wide and her lips disappear. Then, she closes her eyes, shakes her head, and says, “I am so over all the performative virtue-signaling.”

“Yeah, me too.”

In silence, we watch a tall, rangy, white male-presenting, undergraduate-looking individual approach the couple. “Nice kaffiyehs!” The couple produce identical, we’re-flattered-you-noticed smiles, and then Emma and I watch how they all bask in the glow of each other’s recognition. Maybe they all attended today’s protest or recently hung out at some encampment, where they screened out Zionists and bonded over gluten-free meals. I wanted to articulate all this to Emma, because why not be snarky in solidarity when all else fails? But Emma also prefers gluten-free food and spends her days screening people before they can screen her.

“I can’t wait here,” Emma says. “Honestly, I don’t know if I feel safe.”

“Okay.”

“You’re not coming?”

I shake my head. “Nah, I’m going to live my life.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I take a deep breath and succumb to a brief out-of-body experience, where Emma and I are both surviving on smuggled potato peels in a frigid, lice-infested concentration camp barrack and yet she won’t stop accusing me of being a Kapo.

“If you were planning on going to the hooding ceremony before October 7, you should just go.”

“How can you not get it? October 7 changed everything.”

“I know it did, but also…” I stare at Emma’s shiny, gold jewelry and question her grasp on Jewish history. I know she follows someone on Instagram who doesn’t stop posting that 2024 is the new 1938, and I want to tell her while that might be true, it’s also true that she lives in a country with a government that allows her to make her own decisions about wearing yellow Stars of David.

“Honestly, people like you…”

“People like me what?”

But Emma just sighs and shakes her head.

“Whatever,” I say. “Unless the Gestapo comes looking for me and I have to hide in a basement, I’m going to my graduation ceremony.”

Emma shakes her head, and I see the mix of anger, judgement, and deep sadness in her eyes. “It must be so nice not to be on social media,” she says.

“You should try it some time.”

“Yeah well…some of us are activists who actually care about making the world a better place.”

I watch Emma stalk off, her swift gait indicative of someone invested in having the last word. I try to summon up my best therapist self who would note signs of vicarious trauma and social isolation and validate that yes, it sucks when you discover that your friends aren’t really your friends. But I don’t want to be anyone’s therapist at this moment.

For a second, I close my eyes in this public space, exhausted by others who try to shame me for not behaving like them and defeated by my ineptitude with expressing what really needs to be said. We are not the starving, wounded children in Gaza or the doctors without medical supplies in bombed out hospitals or the female hostages awaiting sexual assault at gunpoint in dark tunnels or the residents of Northern Israeli towns marking time in motels, displaced from their homes. We’re not even my friend Jenny, who lives in Tel Aviv, personally knows two of the hostages, and is now on a first-name basis with her bomb shelter.

I open my eyes and order my tea. I prepare to return to my human sexuality classroom one final time, where I might intermittently glance at Emma and maybe acknowledge how lonely it feels to watch someone like her lose the capacity to hold space for more than one group of people.

****

Two months after graduation, I receive news from a former classmate that she ran into Emma at a grocery store and maybe I should reach out. Apparently, Emma looked exhausted and sad and had made some comment about grocery shopping being her only mode of human contact.

I text Emma and propose lunch.  “Do you drink?” she asks and explains that in the era when she had friends, she liked meeting them in bars.

I meet Emma at a gastro pub, where we sit outside and order white wine. I would have started with small talk, (How’s life post grad school?!? Have you started looking for a job yet?) but that’s not Emma’s style.

“I didn’t think you liked me,” she says after her first sip of wine.

I sigh and watch Emma’s face crumple into a sad heap. Clearly, she was expecting me to immediately object.

“I wouldn’t have suggested meeting up if I didn’t like you. I do think you’re a good person. You’re just…intense.”

Emma stares at me, a type of disappointment etched on her face that I recognize from previous conversations with her. “I always get that from people,” she says. “Screw me for caring too deeply about the world.”

I take a large gulp of wine and try to synch my speech with my thoughts. “I know you care about the world, but you can’t force people to believe like you do.” Then I tell her about my experiences in an Orthodox Jewish youth group, where the most effective counselors were the ones who modeled behavior rather than try and actively convert someone to keeping kosher or dressing modestly.

Emma shakes her head. “You have to try and convince people,” she says.

“But what if people don’t want to be convinced?”

“Some people do. You just can’t give up hope.”

We each order another glass of wine and Emma asks me about the graduation ceremony.

“You were missed.”

“I doubt that.”

I shake my head. “Your absence was noticeable.”

Emma shrugs and asks about the speeches. I tell her that Dana, the top-tier antisemite student speaker, asked for five minutes of silence to honor the people of Gaza.

“Did you walk out?”

“No…it didn’t meet my criteria for walking out.”

“You have criteria?”

I inhale defensiveness and exhale anger. But all I say is, “Asking for five minutes of silence for a suffering population isn’t the same as denying a country’s existence.”

“I would have walked out in solidarity with the hostages.”

“Well, I suppose that’s one way to model behavior.”

Emma looks at me with what appears to be confusion. “Honestly, I don’t get where you’re coming from.”

I shrug and decide not to tell her about how I intended to disrupt the graduation ceremony if Dana had strayed into my criteria of antisemitic speech. I would have demanded a few minutes at the speaker podium so that I could ask my fellow graduates if they had truly gotten the memo about how more than one thing can be true at the same time. I would have reminded them that therapists are not supposed to take sides in couples or family therapy. I might have even warned them about the dangers of selective empathy and if they think they’re immune to that, maybe go find a different profession.

We sip our second glasses of wine and the silence between us enters awkward territory. But then Emma asks if I’ve kept in touch with any classmates. I mention two of them that Emma had never singled out to me for belonging to a tier.

“Are you serious? They’re both mid-tier antisemites.”

“I didn’t know that.” I start searching for our server so I can ask for the check.

“I feel like it’s very important for you to be likable to others. So you don’t say things that need to be said.”

I gulp down the rest of my wine and feel my face flush red. “Your tiers were always wrong.”

“Excuse me?”

“A top-tier antisemite isn’t someone posting bullshit on social media. Granted, it might be antisemitism, but it isn’t top-tier.”

“Are you making excuses for acting friendly with Jew-haters?” Emma keeps her arms folded and eyes narrowed.

“I’m not excusing anything. I’m just wondering if you had ever experienced antisemitism before…all this.”

Emma shakes her head.

“I think I mentioned to you that I grew up Orthodox. Well, I also went to public school, where I stood out. In 11^th grade, a boy in my history class used to ‘heil Hitler’ me all the time and once, when I went to the bathroom, he drew a black swastika on my white jacket.”

“Oh wow, that’s terrible.” Emma says this in a flat monotone, as if she hasn’t spent the last several years practicing her empathy skills as a therapist-in-training.

“It was. My point is that all this doesn’t feel very new or shocking to me. Antisemitism’s been around since there’s been Jews and if you’re going to make tiers, I suggest starting with Hitler and going from there. Also, if you really want to effect change, you’re going to have to talk to people who disagree with you.”

“Oh really? Is that what you’re doing?”

Again, I feel my face grow hot. Recently, I ghosted a friend who’s no longer really my friend, because while I’m not really on social media, I had lurked on Instagram long enough to know that she had transformed into Emma’s definition of a top-tier antisemite.

“I aspire to it,” I tell her. “But I get that it’s hard.”

I tell Emma about my “friend,” who came from an upper middle-class family in Peru and has traveled the world and how we used to meet in bars for lively discussions about social justice and the nuances of identity. I thought I knew her and when she started soliciting donations for injured Gazans, I figured we would eventually have an uncomfortable conversation over hard alcohol. She would tell me she’s not antisemitic, just anti-Zionist, and I would tell her that while I also condemn the suffering of Gazan civilians, I believe that Israel has the right to exist. But then I happened to not really be on Instagram and saw that she had posted the Why Jews Have Been Kicked Out of 109 Different Countries meme. Apparently, that meme originated in alt right circles, became a post-October 7 darling of the far left, and essentially states that any group expelled from that many countries should not be trusted with their own homeland.

“Have you seen that one?” I ask Emma.

Emma performs a somber nod. She’s seen all the memes because she’s been glued to social media for months, remember? But then Emma admits that her full-time job of fighting antisemitism interferes with eating and sleeping and has started to affect her mental health.

“Maybe I sound crazy, but I’m afraid now when I go out. That they’re going to come after me. I stopped wearing my jewelry, you know.”

I nod and remember why I texted her. “It sucks when you realize you can’t be friends anymore with your friends.”

“I can’t help it that I’m intense.”

“I’m sorry you’re feeling so afraid.”

“How are you not afraid?”

“I’m just not…not yet at least.”

We sit there in silence, and I remember that long before October 7, I had rebuffed Emma’s attempts to get to know me. And now, I had reached out to her at a time where she had never felt lonelier, but I could not expect her to acknowledge this and/or remember it years later. Instead, I tell her I am tired and have a long drive home. She doesn’t ask if we can do this again.

****

A few months later: My husband finally starts working on his Pre-1933 Murdered Jews of Europe app. Since someone’s already trademarked an app about pogroms and various massacre sites in Eastern Europe, he continues to focus on Western Europe and the medieval: Inquisition sites in Spain and Portugal, in addition to Worms, Mainz, and other German towns where the Crusaders annihilated Jewish communities. So far, he’s created a rough prototype based on the history of the Praça do Comércio. The app user has the option of a choose-your-own adventure type experience, where they become a Jew in 16^th century Lisbon and can experience what it might have been like to encounter an auto-da-fé in the famous plaza.

My husband asks me if I want to help test the prototype, but I demur. It bothers me that I don’t know in advance what kind of 16^th century Jew I might be. I’d like to think that it would never be me burning at the stake, that I would have either fled Portugal or belonged to some bad ass Crypto Jew resistance group that helped the condemned without ever getting caught. I’d like to think that I would know when my friends are no longer my friends and that I would never be standing helpless in the Praça do Comércio, witnessing a loved one burning to death.

“I don’t know if I’m the one to help you,” I finally tell my husband.

My husband looks at me, confused and a little frustrated. “Aren’t you supposed to be my target market?”

I shrug. My husband’s reaction somehow makes me think of Emma. I then try to imagine her in 16^th century Lisbon, but I can only envision her 21^st century self. In this vision, she is no longer shiny or happy, and I am both sorry and not sorry for her loss.

 

Susan Josephs is a Los Angeles-based writer and psychotherapist. Her debut novel Accidental Friends was published earlier this year by Bedazzled Ink Publishing.