For 30 days now, people have been waking up and seeing you. You fall from everyone’s lips and reach the ears of just as many. Constantly. Every hour, every minute.

You are the girl of the moment.

Children—blessed as long as they remain so—ask their parents about you. And the parents, wretched and confused, answer differently than they do when the little ones aren’t around. Yes, because make no mistake, adults talk about you among themselves, too.

Everyone is talking about you, I don’t know how else to say it.

And I am among those (primarily) responsible. You don’t need to thank me, of course. Gratitude isn’t exactly the feeling I’d expect to receive in this situation. Hatred, dear girl; you must hate me. Though I wonder: can the dead hate? Obviously not. The dead—especially those innocent souls torn prematurely and violently from life—do not hate. They have dreams and hopes; they smile, skip rope, and their souls fill with pure feelings before the chromatic spectacle of rainbows. At least, that’s what they—what we—try to tell you all. To sell you all. At first, I felt (or told myself) that I was a messenger of truth. A herald for a public hungry for knowledge. “Hungry.” We’ll come back to that, dear girl. I soon realized there was something macabre in all of it. Something wrong. The way people waited for the news; with that morbid craving. The way they talked about it. The way they smiled (why did they smile?). That hunger for knowledge felt more like a filthy gluttony, deaf to the stomach’s rumblings of pity. Then I realized that the image in the papers wasn’t just that. That body lying face up on a beach. That Pinocchio, once again regressed to an organic state that was no longer human, was being destroyed by me even more than by her flesh-and-blood killer. We wrote of paper emotions, far more noble and two-dimensional than human ones. They have—we have, and I apologize—stuffed you with dreams, ambitions, and hopes that weren’t your own. And you might wonder: “Well, so far, what’s the difference between me and the living?” Perhaps none. But maybe I naively hoped that, at least after death, the hypocrisies and smiles hiding completely different motives might end. Yes, I hoped for one thing while doing the exact opposite. I was there on the front lines, inflating you and your story; making it so bloated and massive that everyone could have a piece of it. This macabre obsession we have with death, so long as it isn’t our own. Did you lose yourself in the city of angels, Wilma? Angels winking at orgies and bribes. What were you doing out there, you who loved the movies and the swings? What were you doing there on that beach, so inconveniently lifeless, you with so many rosy plans for the future? Many people on the streets wondered—as if there hadn’t been a war just a few years prior—”How can someone die at 20?” The question I ask myself is: “Can one be left in peace after dying at 20?” And to that, I wouldn’t know what to answer. Especially if I were looking for something comforting to say. But it’s agonizing because you couldn’t answer, even if you wanted to. And your life keeps flowing on without you. Without you, Wilma—body and person—to encapsulate it and, as much as possible, steer it where you’d like. Toward your dreams. The real ones. The ones that maybe, just maybe, not even you knew you had.