unexposed film

     it was thursday night and i had not eaten since breakfast so i decided, naturally, that shots were the best dinner i could have.

i don't remember how i left the restaurant, or how i got home.

i remember waking up in my bed with an outrageous hang over.

i had blacked out again.

i drank until i couldn't feel anything. again.

     i woke up and felt the urge to leave. i always have this wild urge to leave here. to go somewhere that i don't really understand. i have had this urge since i was younger. now as a thirty year old man i manage to destroy my life in more subtle ways than i did when i was younger.

i grab my old white ipod and throw on a dirty shirt that i have no time to check for smell. i walk outside and the sun burns my eyes as if i was a newborn baby just learning to see. the sky is a brown haze, but i think it looks amazing for a hot california day.

i get in my car and plug in the ipod.

i start rifling through the songs and eventually settle on something i like. i drive off.

i don't really know where i am driving. and i have told no one where i have gone. as a matter of fact i think i have left my phone behind in my room.

good.

fuck everyone.

i drive off down the street and i make my way to the freeway... i'm still so hung over that i don't realize what freeway i got on. but i don't care.

the music plays and i turn it up. today is a music day.

i have always enjoyed listening to music in cars. i have spent many nights with the ones i love doing this very thing. i sing.

i always sing. i feel stupid sometimes when someone is in the car with me, but when i am alone i song. loud.

i drive further away from home and the music keeps playing.

i feel like i can't turn it up loud enough, sometimes.

i hear all my familiar favorites, and sometimes they seem to repeat, even though the ipod is on shuffle. stupid old ipod, hardly works but i still keep it around.

i drive and my eyes move toward the horizon. none of this looks familiar. i have been driving for hours now and i have no idea where i am.

there hasnt been a street sign for miles.

i suddenly worry about gas.

i'm going to run out of gas...i think to myself.

shit.

i look at the gauge and it says the tank is still full. i don't get it, but i don't care. 

time passes and the songs keep playing in my car, then i hear my favorite song.

Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space the ladies voice says... and i swear i hear something i have never heard in the background of the song before. it sounds like someone says, "please come back". i think it's strange and i keep driving.

i turn it up and i sing. i sing the words like i do, all loud and strained. and i remember taking ashley to see Spiritualized and when they played this song all i could do was cry.

i am crying now.

the road ahead begins to shake away in my field of vision. the edges blur like some effect i have tried to achieve in one of the videos i have made for someone else. i can feel it leaving.

the road fades away completely and i cannot hear the music anymore.




...in my mind i feel like there is new information. like i can remember what happened that night i drank my self into oblivion.

that night i left the restaurant not knowing exactly where i was at. i was blacked out drunk and running away from something i hold inside my mind. i was hurting and i tried my hardest to numb it away.

i ran into the street. into traffic and was hit by a passing car.

the whole left side of my body smashed into the front of that car and i was thrown into the gutter like
     all of the lazily penned dreams i have shoved into notebooks and left for no one to find.

the police found me barely breathing and broken in the gutter of a far away street. unconscious and bleeding. my glasses were gone. i had always made sure to know where my glasses had gone, even when i had been that drunk before.

i was loaded into the ambulance and had slipped into a coma before i had  reached the emergency room.

my mother was my emergency contact but she was at work and far away so she called ashley in a panic and ashley came to find me.

when she saw me in that hospital room hooked up to all those machines with tubes down my throat to keep me breathing she shook so hard she passed out before she even made it to my side.

eventually after a day or two they were told to talk to me. so that i might wake up.

ashley knew how much i always listened to music wherever i was. i would even turn on the radio in the kitchen for the brief time it took me to get a glass of water. thats how much i loved music.

she brought my little ipod speakers and began to play me my favorite songs.

she never left my side and the music played around the clock, softly at night so as not to disturb anyone else. but it played.

this was the music i was hearing in my car.

i never made it home that night. i never got up and went for a drive. i never opened my eyes to see the sun on that bright May morning.

i had been in a dying mans dream. a dream on an endless loop where i never knew where i was going but i never cared either. a dream where i could hear my favorite songs play until the lights went out. until the road faded away.

i never woke up.

i faded away alone and in my own mind. just the way i wanted to.

     it was the worst feeling i ever had the pleasure of having in my short life.

i never felt the last touch of my love. the one who cared for me so deeply that it ruined her. the one who brought music to me. so i would come back. and i couldn't even come back to her.

"please come back", she said to me.

 my heart stopped beating soon after she spoke those words. just as Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space trailed off into it's own end.

i had chased that song for half of my life, and when i finally found it i couldn't share it with anyone.

i never woke up...