Commissioned during the COVID-19 lockdown by Theatre Bay Area for their annual Gala, I created this work in response to the 2020 uprisings incited by George Floyd's murder. I heard Nina Simone's words on the radio, speaking at a 1968 concert she performed in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr's assassination, a man she considered a comrade. The title comes from a lyric she sang at that concert, which she interrupted to speak about the recent deaths of many close friends. The visuals of this video reflect the exhaustion, grief and resolve I heard in her voice, reverberating across time and generations. Nina spoke both to her time and to the moment I was living through, and I was struck by the depressingly cyclical nature of the violences and premature deaths she described. The video explores the ways Black/Afro-Diasporic peoples are trapped in the same spirals of violence, which merely take on new forms. At the end I heed Nina’s call of “staying close,” interspersing moments of common intimacy that keep us alive: caressing a face, hands around a lover’s neck. This video is a prayer, an offering, a call towards hope, and a manifesto illustrating how we can attempt to live "with the threat of death ahead."