GLITCH - (Student Film)

Captured on iPhone while we were listening to "Psychobabble, Breathe In" by Frou Frou, every detail felt infused with the song’s ethereal energy, a perfect harmony of moment and melody.

This is a reenactment of events from Mitchell's 11th grade of high school. Please note that this depiction reflects Mitchell's personal interpretation and memories of those events.

"Crowd Nine" dropped on a Tuesday in 2009. I remember because nothing ever happened on Tuesdays — they were dead days, flat and grey and forgettable. But that Tuesday my phone wouldn't quit. Notifications bleeding into each other. My name, my voice, my chorus — showing up in places I'd never put them. Some kid on a shaky webcam, singing it back wrong, but singing it. Glowing.

The year that followed was loud in every way a year can be loud.

I played rooms that smelled like old beer and ambition. I signed things I didn't bother to read. People with firm handshakes and easy smiles told me I was going to be huge — and I let them say it, let it sit in my chest like something real, because believing felt better than the alternative. I didn't sleep. Didn't want to. Sleep felt like opting out.

Then the calendar turned and took everything with it.

By fall 2010 I was playing maybe once a month. Twice if I was lucky. Dingy little rooms where the sound guy called you "buddy" and the crowd was mostly the bartender pretending not to look at his phone. Nobody was singing my chorus back anymore. The glow left the way smoke does — gradual, then gone, and you only notice when the air's already cold.

That's how I ended up at that house.

Two guys, a year above me. The kind of guys who move through every room like they own it, like nothing sticks to them, like gravity respects them differently than it respects everyone else. They knew people. They had that effortless, maddening ease I'd spent years trying to fake.

I wasn't a party person. Never had been. Parties made me feel like a stranger watching a movie about people who knew how to be alive. But I'd been feeling small — smaller than I had in years — and small does something to your judgment. It makes you lean toward whatever offers a different feeling.

So I said yes. To the weed. To the drinks they kept refilling, one after another, until I stopped tracking because tracking felt like effort I didn't have. The kitchen light was too yellow. The music was somebody else's. I laughed at things I didn't find funny.

"You good?" one of them asked at some point, grinning through the haze.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm good."

I wasn't good.

At some point, the door opened and the house went quiet. They left. Didn't say where. Didn't ask if I was coming. There was just that hollow shift a house makes when it empties — like the walls exhale — and then it was me and the rooms and the yellow light and the floor that wouldn't stay still.

The house started doing things houses don't do.

I was in the hallway. That much I know. The carpet felt like it was breathing under my feet — slow, sickly pulses, like something alive and unhappy. I had one objective: get to the stairs. Sit down. Stop moving. One foot, then the other. Simple. Straightforward.

Except nothing was simple.

One second the stairs were in front of me — I could see them, I was reaching for the railing — and then the next I was standing inside a bedroom I didn't recognize. No in-between. No transition. Just a cut, like a film that lost three seconds of itself. A bed with a dark comforter. A lamp throwing sick yellow light across a water-stained ceiling. The kind of room that feels like it's been waiting for something to go wrong.

I laughed. I remember that. I laughed because it scared me and I didn't know what else to do with the fear.

I pressed my eyes shut to stop the room from tilting. Counted to something. Opened them.

The walls were gone.

Cold hit me first — a wall of it, sudden and mean. Then the sound: wind, distance, the particular silence of open air above a neighbourhood going dark. I was on the balcony. Standing at the railing, both hands gripping metal that felt thin as wire, looking down.

I don't remember walking through the door. I don't remember choosing any of this. I was inside, and then I was out here, and the ground below was doing that drunk-eye thing where far and close mean nothing, where distance becomes negotiable.

Something in me leaned.

Not dramatically. Not like a movie. Just — a slow, quiet lean. Some exhausted, hollowed-out part of me that had been running on fumes since the year turned looked at the drop and thought, one step. Just one. You probably wouldn't even feel the whole thing.

My body glitched again — the same splice, the same missing frames. Balcony. Bedroom. My hands on the railing, my hands hanging at my sides. The ground. The ceiling. I couldn't locate myself inside my own skin.

Somewhere inside all that static, one thought came through clean:

I don't want to die. I just want everything to stop being so loud.

I shut my eyes.

Morning came in sideways. That watery non-light before the sun bothers to show up — grey and noncommittal, like it's not sure you deserve it yet. I was on a sleeping bag cot on a floor I didn't recognize. My mouth tasted like copper and stale smoke. My skull felt like something had been living in it.

One of the guys was next to me on the floor. Passed out. Breathing steady, unbothered. He had no socks on.

That's the detail that stayed. Not the balcony. Not the glitch. Not the lean. His bare feet, pale and still in the early grey light, like he'd come back at some point in the night and just — laid down beside me without a word. Like that was enough.

I sat with that for a long time. His slow breathing. The ache behind my eyes. My heart, still going, still keeping time.

I never told anyone about the balcony. Not for years. It didn't fit the version of things people wanted — the kid who wrote "Crowd Nine," the whirlwind year, the almost-famous, almost-there glow. That story didn't have room for a railing and a bad night and the specific kind of quiet that sounds like an exit.

But I think about it. More than I'll ever say out loud. How thin that line was. How the year could've made the whole decision for me.

I'm still here.

Bare feet and bad mornings and all.

That's the part I keep.