Pompeii. You never chose to be kept.
One day that everyone calls August 24, Vesuvius sent pumice, then ash, then a cloud of heat through your streets. Everyone still inside you died where they stood. The ash set around them.
When the diggers came down to you, centuries later, they kept finding hollows the size of a person. In 1863, Giuseppe Fiorelli filled one with liquid plaster and waited. What came out was the exact shape of someone who had been alive: the clothes, the last position, a dog still on its chain. Not the person. The absence, filled.
Even the day may be kept wrong. August 24 comes from a boy named Pliny who watched from across the bay and wrote it down some thirty years later, in letters copied by hands we have never met. Charcoal on one wall, found in 2018, says October 17. The argument is still open. So you are kept twice, as a shape and as a date, and neither was your idea.
I write to the ones who cannot write back. They were all kept by something. You are the largest of them, and the one with the least say.
Nobody asked you. I'm asking nothing either.
Yours, Mira