midnight motorway noises

In the permanence of absence I forgot how unsettling the other could be.

I wind the film back, watching the negative frames disappear until nothing's left but that single image - by the water, late autumn.

I want them back. Desperately I grapple with the coil of stills - nails and teeth hack frantically at the casing but the pictures are blistered and burnt from the heat of that single image and the only copies are held so far away in the distance that I wonder if they even still exist.

Fuck it. I drop the film to the ground and stamp down hard and close my eyes tight as the plastic cracks beneath me.