Chapter 1

Some months ago, a teenager killed himself, my wife was her therapist, I write this lines with almost 2000 words written already (It flew over me, ups), and I figured it was useful info. He left a video.

The video begins with him looking at his computer’s screen. There must be a cut erasing the moment where he starts to film. For a moment he seems just about to say something, showing a slim gap between his skinny lips, it cuts, now to the title, the sentence “My last message” appears, I compared the characters with many fonts and the one I found it most similar with is a free-to-download one called “dejavu”. This is all I can say about the first segment.

Segment #2 shows him in a different position, this proves that the words about to get out before were cut out, his decision. Since his eyes are fixed slightly below the camera, he might be seeing himself in the screen, his face in the center and the black room as a background, some posters and a bookshelf are barely distinguishable. Again, he builds himself up to speak, and barely begins, it seems like a difficult first step to walk, I’ll avoid the inclusion of the many pauses he makes in order to give more bearable text, unless the meaning of the pause is important for the video.

“I felt that I own an explanation to all of you, family, friends, my parents, most of all. Even my pet, you can show her this video too. It’s been a long time since I felt like moving at all, so I know that many of you noticed the sudden change lately, two months ago I was all day on my bedroom and now I can’t stop moving around and getting out with friends, I know you, mom, are happy for this change, I know you see it as an improvement, I will now show (pause) tell you what happened. I believe I was depressed, or at least tired of living before it, I remember times when I wanted to visit some interesting place or a nice restaurant and it all turns just bad, not even sad, boring, or disappointing, it could be as good as I wanted, and it still was a bad memory in the end.”

His speech begins, not apologizing, but promising explanations, this must be because he did not see his next action as something wrong. The pauses could mean there was no prior script, he had ideas and an order to follow, but it changes his mind constantly in the original video. Almost all examples of this were left out, but I decided to preserve “show, tell” because of the clear differences between the words, on spelling and meaning, could this mean he had a way to show what he had seen?

Even without a cut, I label the following telling as a separate segment.

Segment #3-a starts a story, a core difference with segment #3-b is that “a” is still possible in nature. Another element in this part is his gaze; still fixed in the screen. Since both segments share the same story, they also share the same number.

“Almost five months ago, one week after my birthday, I told you I was going to the cinema with some friends, I lied, I went alone since I had no one to follow me. The movie was, I can’t remember right now, and it doesn’t matter anyway. I remember very well that I went, I sat down almost in the middle of the place, and ate popcorn throughout the whole movie, this I can remember, but the movie itself is completely gone, it’s as if the lights never went off, and in a second the people was already getting up. I stayed, I felt like there was no use, I would have stayed there as long as I were allowed. It was a long wait, but the lights turned down again, the screen lit up. I saw the film.”

“I’ve seen some old movies before, black and white movies, and the images seemed to be older than any of them, this was obvious since the very first frame, seconds of a written letter in an unrecognizable language and the names of the people involved, couldn’t be more than five, but I don’t remember any name. I’m almost never impressed by the cinematography of a movie, but as soon as the lonely houses and towns scattered across fields of green close to a mountain were shown I was hooked, all my body relaxed, I lost all senses on my arms and legs. The images of the daily life of this people working fields and bringing bread home from above, picturing them as tiny dots. The camera left the sky and got close with them, there was the silhouette of friends hanging around at dusk, one of them turned and waved, I almost waved back”

“This went on for the first part of the movie, people talking, people walking, people fixing fences. The music was nice, I guess, an old orchestra, and they played with it, because the sound stopped as soon as a new kind of scene showed. It’s hard to notice the first time you see the movie, but if you pay attention, you can see the first plane as a small dot in the sky, like, the music stops, and it’s there. Whoever made this movie is a genius, because I’ve never felt so uncomfortable, the high contrast of the good life and the beautiful countryside completely broken by a small machine, and this continues with the movie.”

“You never hear the music again, but you hear the humming sound of engines coming, and they do too, some people look to the sky, some point skyward to others. The next plane is obvious, a metal cross over a fade of black grey to white grey, there’s no clouds. It almost makes you feel fear over them, and you know they are many because it’s always a different model, or different colours, it’s the same with the people, it’s many families and many towns, and I would take the risk on saying it’s many countries because I swear I saw a desert.”

“I was curled on my seat, just seeing the planes was horrifying, and I was drowned by their whistle, that sound they made when they dive. I remember in a documentary that it was designed on purpose to scare, and I swear it does, it came from everywhere, I felt like one of the little kids in the movie running back home at the scream of the machines, but I couldn't move. There was no escape for me, or home to run to, I was trapped by several empty red chairs.”

On this segment I underlined a specific sentence, I did because it looks like proof that he was able to watch the movie again, since he seems to be able to do it to be certain of the presence of the first plane. Also, I was sure the movie he talks about doesn’t match any other, or at least I couldn’t find it on my previous research.

He is way more comfortable than in the last segment, he makes almost no pauses in his retelling, and I didn’t have to edit as much as in the last one. Other than this, his behaviour doesn’t change that much.

I have to make a small edit on the structure of the video, because segment #3-b has been completely cut out of it, I had to beg my wife to go through the files of his computer, she is involved in his whole case and she asked me for my opinion, looking back it was another mistake, but whatever, we found the lost segment as a deleted file, lord bless machines.

Segment #3-b, again, begins with his face almost sticked to the camera, but now it’s obvious he is reminiscing something by his lost gaze and a new curve on the side of his lips.

“They become a swarm before you notice. What was a lonely monster on the distance becomes an army covering the sky, each with its great power to destroy. You notice by now what they are here to, and the people know too, some hide in their houses, some run towards the hills or beneath trees. One shot shows a crowd running pass a woman, she is standing still in front of her house, it breaks me apart, she will die in seconds”

“There so many people praying, so many crying, and for each, there’s a shot of a plane dropping a bomb, all of them, thanks god each goes off for two seconds at most, but the movie shows you with great detail the amount of destruction they bring, because you know that with each, there are children dying on their schools, there are house turned into rubble with their inhabitants still inside, there are people in the street gone in an instant, there are unlucky people surviving with broken bones.”

“And they don’t stop with this. Again, for each bomb falling, they also shot the moment they hit the ground, and the people around, or close by. The ground shakes and the dust overcome the bodies, so they get lost on the grey film. This movie is something else, I don’t believe for a moment some people were able to film, with this degree of detail, on a camera as old as a world war veteran. There’s no cinema trick to explain it, and you also believe as soon as you see it, every frame is real, every plane made of real steel, every building destroyed by real fire, and the worst of all, every person crying for help that will never come is also really there. It made me cry”

A new pause, he asks himself in silence if it’s worth to keep talking and takes a quick decision.

“Then the chair next to me made a sound, it was a ghost, I turned to see her wrinkled face, she looked at me too and talked, I won’t tell you her last message, you’ll hear her when you play the movie.”

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I’ll use this break to recommend you a song

Gustavo peña, El principe – Los enamora2

LET’S CONTINUE

ᲒᲐᲤᲒᲐᲤᲬᲬᲒᲐᲤ

Segment #4 is what you can see right after in the original video. In an awkward cut he appears in different clothes and wet hair, he had had a bath or days had passed. For the first time he looks relaxed, laying back on his chair, my wife says he even looks happy, but I know he just feels like he is on his last day. He doesn’t continue the film story but gives an afterthought about it.

“It really moved me, now I can’t think about anything else. And that’s weird, you know? Because I’ve seen many movies with worse things happening, I’ve even seen gore and liveleak videos and none of them were like this. I don’t like the word bleak but honestly, I don’t know how else I can describe it. It left me with nothing, at least I was able to have some fun with my friends, now I go out alone, if I go out at all…”

“In the beginning I said I didn’t have anybody to go to the cinema with, but that’s not completely true. Looking back, I had good friends, they would have gone, I’m sure, but I was a self-loathing shit that time, blaming myself for things I did, of didn’t do. But that’s normal, I messed up and I felt bad for it, and at the same time going out with them made me forget about it and enjoy a bit. Now I have nothing, not guilt, not pleasure, not even sadness to mourn all that people. It’s like that little girl in the movie, but without her beauty (He stops, seemingly to laugh at his own joke, he doesn’t), she knew what was coming, and she couldn’t fight it, no way to do it, the sound of the apocalypse broke her before the thunder scorched the earth.”

“I have many theories about the movie; Did it do something to me? Does it work with anyone? What about the woman? Sometimes I decide to work on them and investigate, but I end on bed, killing hours looking into the ceiling and beyond, no studying, no more watching movies, no music. I haven’t slept for two days; I’ve bathed in nothing but sweat. Tomorrow I’ll choose a method, and I’ll be death by Tuesday”

“I love you all, I’m not sad or unhappy. Sorry, I guess. If you need a reason, I’m depressed. Kisses.”

I searched for more files, nothing. The original video, as it is edited, becomes the suicide note of a depressed kid, it’s obvious he wants to lean on that narrative because it’s easier to accept than the alternative given by the last segment.

My wife believes he had a hallucinatory episode, I think that’s bullshit, but I didn’t argue. The best way was to find the movie, it would have been easier if he had said the language of the title, but I had to go blind for five whole months, internet archive, torrents, libraries, the cinema he went to, and you guessed it, I only found pain on my feet.

But that’s not the end of the story, because it really is a ghost movie, and it must have rules for its own existence. It was last week, I was on an antique store that my girl wanted to go to, I was not supposed to be there, and you won’t believe what I found when I was almost forgetting about all the issue.

Its name is 世相, (sesō), means something like “signs of the time”. Of course he didn’t what the title was. It was on a cd, and I knew it was it by the many planes on the cover. I didn’t tell my wife I bought it.

I had to buy a cd player too, but that same night I saw it. It’s clear the boy was still young because there are many things he left out in his retelling of the movie, like that in the very beginning you already can notice some towns are from South America and some scenes later you are on Poland. He also downplayed the destruction a lot, it drags until people come to rescue the survivors and close their wounds with white clothes. At some point I was afraid of what has to come next, I imagined a corpse watching me from the corner of the room, or a spirit coming to speak on dreams. Instead, it showed itself as a kid, seven years tops, playing with a teddy on the floor. It’s weird how similar they are to real humans; the lights were turned on so he even casted a shadow on the carpet. I watched him as the movie ended, then I stood up, and walked closer to him, he reminded me to a child a friend of mine has, I waited for his message, and nothing. Only now I realize that it sent a kid to me because I already knew what it had to say, just as it sent an old person to the last one in order to explain the things better.

I won’t tell you, it ruins the fun, but it’s simple, it’s the same thing that killed us inside before we had to end the job.

If you want, you can look for the film. On my side, I’ll choose a method tomorrow, and I’ll be death by Saturday, I’ll try not to do the same as the previous kid.