She was a light to me in a life full of darkness. That’s why I chose her to witness me in the moments leading up to my death. She was an artist, so I handed her my camera and asked her to please film the dress rehearsal of my suicide. It wasn’t that I wanted to traumatize her, but that I was in awe of the way she transmuted everything into beauty and I thought that maybe if she held the camera just right, a crack of her light would seep into my darkness and that I’d become beautiful, too.
Emily Buli’s work has appeared in Maudlin House, Expat Press, Blood+Honey, and God’s Cruel Joke.