I’ve sat shoulder-to-shoulder with Casey through all the sad movies of the last six years. We were the last two in the theater downtown, the last place playing The Boy and the Heron. I felt her heart beat as fast as my own when The Boy ran—flip flops smacking against the road; small, sharp exhales; and no other noise—to the hospital where his mother was dying in a fire. He saw her silhouette in the window. It was so quiet. The quiet is what scared me the most.

The helplessness of not being able to do anything but stand there and watch something burn.

I’ve been a half-orphan for nine years. Ten years in December. Casey lost her mother four years ago. We talk, directly and indirectly, about grief often. It’s shaped us both—our work, our interests, our choices.

Casey knows where she will be buried, right next to her mother, in a grave she already bought. My father’s ashes, or what’s left of the bits of him I couldn’t bear to part with, sit in my emergency-fire-escape box, the one thing I’ll reach for the next time California erupts in flame.

When I needed to work through We Live in Time, the film that followed me for two weeks after my first viewing, I also needed Casey there with me. I was embarrassed when, on this second viewing, I realized minutes in that the story is beautiful. I’d spent two weeks ranting and raving to her about the sparse dialogue, the baby-or-cancer question, the things left unshared. Sitting there, shoulder to shoulder, I realized that I am simply terrified of and fascinated by the film: it holds every fear that I hold. They all intersect in this 1-hour and 44-minute film.

In Tobias, I saw the desperation of a lover holding on to every fleeting moment, wishing to mail wedding invitations and placing a round diamond on his dying partner’s finger. In Almut, I saw the relentless drive of a woman fighting against time to leave a final mark on the world, to drop enough breadcrumbs for her daughter to find her again after she is gone. They are both terrifyingly stuck between letting go and holding on.

I am terrified to fall in love.

I am terrified to love someone who wants things that I do not want.

I am terrified that I don’t know exactly what I want.

I am afraid to have a baby.

I am afraid to not have a baby.

I am afraid I cannot have a baby.

I am worried that cancer is my fate.

I am worried that ovarian cancer specifically is my fate.

I don’t know what I’ll do if I fall in love with someone who has bigger emotions than me.

I don’t know what I’ll do if I fall in love with someone who is more emotionally intelligent than me.

I have no idea how I could break someone’s heart by getting cancer.

I have no idea how I would cope with the reality of detonating in the middle of someone’s life.

I don’t know if I am worth it.

I don’t know if my love is worth the pain of what I might become.

I sat there tonight thinking all of these things. Watching my ambition play out in a dying woman who just wants to complete one final task. To taste the excitement of competition one last time. To leave something to be remembered by.

I watched my desperate need for other people play out in the loving male partner whose big brown eyes well up when he is happy, when he is sad, when he is moved.

My somewhat unapologetic, innate awkwardness hobbled across the screen when he fumbled with his shoes in the strip-down before sex.

But my sharp tongue was also there telling him to fuck off when he said he was falling in love and needed to know if she was a baby person like him.

I am terrified that, unlike him, the person I end up loving won’t come back after I bristle at the question of “baby?” I am worried they won’t understand that I am scared. If my father, a far better human than me, got fifty years, then I might only have sixteen left by the logic that sometimes steers my thoughts. What if sixteen years is all I have to give? What if sixteen years is all I have to take?

I have been the weeping, all-consumed lover Tobias, and I have more recently been the ambitious Almut. The story ambushed me with the realization that I don’t want to have to choose or be one or the other, but unlike them, I’m just one person, not two characters. These contradictions are bundled inside of me, forcing me to consider who I’ve been, who I am, and who I want to become. I am afraid that I embody the most extreme qualities in both of them. I don’t want to have to find the middle ground alone.

I am afraid because Almut in the film has already accomplished so much and doesn’t know it. I am afraid because Tobias in the film is already with the person he loves. I am afraid that I am, in both respects, behind.

I am afraid.

I am afraid.

I am afraid.

I hate the silence of the film, the unsaid words because I am greedy. I have so many questions left unanswered from my father. There were so many other things I wanted to say. I choke on bubbling-up words all the time.

Ever since my father died—nearly a decade ago—I’ve slept with rain sounds and a movie playing. For the first five years, it was always Pride & Prejudice, the 1995 version. It was the last thing I watched with him on the night I found out that he would die in days, hours, minutes—the night a doctor flipped over the hourglass and said, “On your mark, get set, go.”

I wake in a cold sweat, in a gasp, on nights when the sounds stop. The silence slips into my dreams and jolts me awake. So it’s no wonder that I couldn’t at first bear a movie that didn’t say everything.

Tell me it’s going to be okay.

Tell me she’s going to live.

Tell me he’s not going to crumble if she dies.

Tell me the child remembers her mother.

Tell me she sees them from heaven.

Tell me they stand waving at each other across that ice skating rink forever.

Tell me that forever is a place where I’ll find you, much more than sixteen years from now.

Tonight, instead, I found the necessity of silence, the unavoidability of questions without answers. A life ends with a final breath, and then it is quiet. I have to learn to live with the quiet. Maybe the quiet has something to say.