I Love You Don’t Die

Time passes. Sleep, wake, work, fuck, die. Maybe, if lucky: love. Love in restaurants, parks, apartments, bars, cafés, shelters, kitchens, museums, galleries, theaters, bookstores, libraries; walking sidewalks, riding trains, hailing cabs to reach these places where we might find love. People to love. We think love will fulfill our lives, lengthen them, and maybe love will, but maybe love won’t. We try, and try, and try again, losing meaning through repetition. Different curation but same museums; different riders but same subway trains; same daily bullshit, same cops bullying the churro lady, same trash piling up on the tracks. Different meals but same restaurants. Different cafés but same blocks—blame gentrification. Rent going up, real estate lines redrawn. Neighbors dying, neighbors moving out, temporary neighbors moving in for a summer internship, neighbors evicted. Cycle of the city until cut short by climate change. Don’t worry. The city is resilient. The city bounces back. Nevertheless, maybe during our lifetime, or during Vicky’s lifetime, the city will flood. Burn. Raze into a developer’s wet dream. Banks and Starbucks and chain fast food. It won’t be the same city, like the neighbors always changing into different faces, same expressions. Happy, sad, tired, joyful—joy! There is joy because there is love despite the disasters. Wildfire haze, rightful protests taking over the streets, mass death—death, al-ways death, and yet, I can’t live without you so you can’t die, thinks Vicky when she looks at Jen. When she looks at Angela. Vicky would punch Death in the face if she could. Rip his black cloak to shreds. But Vicky isn’t stupid. She’s deranged, but she’s not stupid. She knows Death will come, eventually, for her and for everyone she loves—hasn’t she been dreaming about Death ever since she’d been young? Death’s endless pursuit, her exhausted legs running away from his jaws. So she wakes up as much as she can so she can embrace another day of living, even if no matter how much she wakes up, she’ll still die in the end. Yes, the end will come. She will die. The people she loves will die. They’ll die someday. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next year, maybe in fifty—i f she’s lucky to have that much time, but she’s been lucky to love in her own way, so maybe she’ll be lucky enough that the love will last for her lifetime. A life that she spends dining with her best friend and waking up with Kevin and Angela, chugging coffee and opening the laptop and watching some television and trudging around the city ignoring the fake monks who want to give her wooden bracelets and dropping coins in the open erhu case of the serenader and cursing the MTA when the train’s late. Stand clear of the closing door. Showtime. Sometimes she imagines her life moving like the view out the window on the 2/3 express from 42nd to 72nd. Flashing by, indistinct, until something re-markable or strange grinds the journey to a halt. An ending. A death, again. But death has not struck this group of friends and lovers, not yet. So Vicky goes to techno with Kevin and Angela, splits a spliff on the fire escape with Jen, buys a zhizha of a mansion and a luxury car and a set of fancy silverware, ideates urn campaigns, replies to emails, writes presentation decks. Goes into production, works late. Texts back. It’s a busy life she leads. But she makes time. Carves out time from her calendar. Chops, gouges, wounds it like the shadow grooves on the sidewalks—the sun is setting earlier. Time jumps forward. Autumn already! Where did the time go? When would Vicky stop being surprised that time passes quickly, that she is getting older? When would she stop asking herself these questions? She forgets that she for-gets. Shocked to find it is her birthday again. Here is a new year, and to celebrate, the friends and lovers go to a dim sum palace in Flushing. Eric gives her a book on Chinese funerary traditions he picked up at a secondhand art book store on the Upper East Side; Jen knows Vicky loves giving presents but hates receiving them herself, preferring people just show up as an act of care, so she hugs her for so long that Vicky has to extricate herself in embarrassment; Kevin and Angela show up with an Ube Overload Cake from the Red Ribbon in Woodside, the chiffon cake filled with so much ube halaya that Vicky wishes her entire being too was bright purple and as delicious as the yam. Bizarre that last year’s birthday she had not known these two, and that for this year’s birthday here they are, cherished, lugging a sugary mass of sweet, laughing with Jen and Eric like the four had known one another since childhood. Who would Vicky meet next, who would come to next year’s celebration? Would there even be a next year? Is it presumptuous, ridiculous, futile, to waste hope for a next year? The friends and lovers go to the top floor of the big mall for karaoke at the lounge with the leopard-print walls and mirrors and disco balls. So campy and kitschy and glorious. They order the drinks and the most expensive platter (it’s Vicky’s birthday, they can splurge for one day). Vicky thinks this might just be the best time of her life. So many ways it could be worse and no way it could be better; if she was allowed to repeat one day out of her entire life, it would be this. She knows she’ll never be truly happy and that she’ll never be so nearly happy as she is now, among friends and lovers who sing and dance and revel, together, because to revel needs more than one. She suppresses her fears of the future. Grips the microphone, sways her hips. Better to be in the now. Vicky and Jen sing the song they always sing together, “Umbrella” by Rihanna. They do their classic dance where Jen places her palms above Vicky’s head in a makeshift umbrella while Vicky shimmies and belts out, “AY AY AY AY.” Kevin and Angela choose a Cantopop classic and it passes without notable incident, because Kevin has too good of a singing voice for proper karaoke and Angela is too self-conscious to dance freely. Eric settles on a new BTS release, a song about good times yet to come. He had learned the choreography at a workout class and performs it as he sings off-key in mispronounced Korean. The rest of them holler and clap as they sway on the soft couch, abs working to keep themselves upright. Then the hour they booked is over. Done. The karaoke worker peeks his head in, tells them to get out. An hour, so fast. Gone by so quickly, like the summer. Like her youth. Vicky has so much of life left and yet so little. At least she has Jen and Angela and Kevin and Eric. Together they ignore time’s inevitability. Let the death fall where it may. Too busy to pay attention to nothingness because there are cakes to eat and songs to sing and people to love, for when the world ends, love is what will linger on.

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From I Love You Don’t Die by Jade Song, provided courtesy of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2026 by Jade Song. Reprinted by permission.