The first shots were chaotic. Streets that smelled of gasoline and hot asphalt became their stage, the flickering streetlights their spotlight. Susana walked the lines she had scribbled on scraps of paper, Jordan's camera wobbling in his hands, capturing the uneven light as if it mattered that every shadow shifted. Margret performed in bursts of energy, screaming, laughing, crying, sometimes all at once. Mirabel painted backdrops on the walls they passed, tiny streaks of colour catching in the corners of the city where no one else noticed.
Each day bled into the next. They were hungry and tired, but they didn't stop. Jordan was obsessed with slow-motion shots. "The world moves too fast," he muttered one evening, balancing the camera atop a fire escape. "I want us to feel like forever."
Susana left her scripts in random corners of the city. One day, she slipped a page beneath a park bench. Another, she scrawled a line on a dusty train window with her finger, smudging it as the train rolled past. The words stayed long enough for a passerby to glimpse, to pause, perhaps to feel, but then they were gone, like whispers in a half-remembered dream.
Margret developed rituals. Before every scene, she would scream into the wind, raising her arms as though to shake the world itself. "To clear the lungs," she said, always smiling, though sometimes the corners of her eyes betrayed a sadness she never voiced. Her voice echoed off the empty streets, bouncing against walls, leaving something intangible in the air.
Mirabel's rituals were quieter, almost invisible. She painted stars wherever she could, on walls, on shoes, even on the back of Jordan's neck while he slept. Tiny dots of colour, constellations only they could see, mapping a universe no one else knew existed. She hummed a song no one recognised, a lullaby stitched from memory and imagination, and the rooftop seemed to breathe along with her melody.
Susana was meticulous. She kissed her pen before writing, tracing words with reverence. She wrote lines meant to make someone cry alone at 2 a.m., lines she whispered into the wind as if casting spells. The words were her little immortality, scattered across the city in case someone, someday, remembered.
Their improvisation became a form of alchemy. Every location, every object, every drop of rain became part of their project. They filmed at an abandoned train station, the tracks silent but alive with echoes of passing trains that had long stopped. Jordan filmed Susana pacing along the platform, reading a letter she had written to herself years in the future. Margret ran through the empty tunnel, letting her voice ricochet, each scream a note in a symphony only they could hear. Mirabel painted figures stepping into light and shadow, shapes that seemed to breathe with their pulse.
It was messy. Sometimes unbearable. But it was real. Every frame captured a truth they could not otherwise speak.
And yet, small anomalies began creeping into their world. A café where they had once spent hours, laughing over burnt toast and bitter coffee, had shuttered without notice. The art supply store Mirabel loved was "permanently closed" when she returned, shelves bare, signage faded. The streets they walked daily seemed thinner, quieter, as if the city itself were drawing back, leaving only the four of them standing in a half-remembered memory.
One evening, after a long day of shooting, Susana returned home to find her bedroom subtly altered. Posters on the wall were gone, her desk had been wiped clean, and her belongings rearranged in ways she did not recognise. She showed the others the next day, and they laughed it off.
"You're just sleep-deprived," Jordan said, ruffling her hair.
"You live in your head too much," Margret added, smirking.
Mirabel didn't comment. She merely watched, eyes narrowing as she tilted her head, reading the light on the walls as if it whispered secrets only she could understand.
They ignored the changes, or maybe they simply could not see them. Instead, they focused on the film, their obsession deepening. Every day was devoted to creating something that felt eternal. They experimented with new techniques: long takes in empty libraries after hours, improvisational dialogues in graffiti tunnels, painting abstract sequences across walls and windows that would later appear in their film as fleeting, vivid memories.
On rainy days, they worked faster, driven by the storm. Jordan loved the droplets hitting the lens, Susana wrote furiously while the city blurred beyond the window, Margret screamed under the downpour to clear her lungs, and Mirabel sketched raindrops falling across a figure whose face she never revealed. The rain made the world strange, mutable, as though it were a lens through which they could glimpse the unreality creeping at the edges of their lives.
By night, they returned to the rooftop, the place that remained constant. They reviewed footage under the fading light, laughing, sometimes crying quietly. Ad memorised her lines with a precision that frightened her, Susana refined her scripts, Mirabel painted new constellations, and Jordan examined the footage frame by frame, searching for meaning in every shadow, every flicker of light.
Their obsession began to consume them. They stopped keeping track of time. Nights bled into days without notice. Meals became incidental. Sleep was stolen in brief naps on the rooftop, tangled in blankets, shoulders pressed together for warmth or comfort. And in those moments of quiet, they whispered their dreams aloud:
"I want to act on a real stage," Margret said one night, voice soft under the stars, eyes glistening. "Like… with curtains, velvet chairs, and silence before the lights go up."
"I want to shoot something that wins an award no one watches," Jordan replied, voice low, almost conspiratorial, eyes reflecting the rooftop's faint glow.
"I want to write something that makes someone cry," Susana added, her gaze drifting to the skyline, the city beyond, the lights they would never capture. "Cry. Alone. At 2 a.m."
Mirabel, quiet as ever, finally spoke: "I just want to be seen."
Even amidst the chaos, the world beyond the rooftop began to slip. Names were missing from lists, IDs failed to scan, and familiar faces failed to recognise them. Margret received a text from her mother that seemed impossibly old, words laced with longing from a time she could not recall. Susana's voice went missing from audio recordings. Mirabel's enrollment was erased from school rosters. And yet, they persisted. They filmed harder, laughed louder, and acted wilder. The rooftop was real. Their art was real. The rest of the world could wait.
As days blurred together, a strange clarity emerged: the film was no longer about capturing moments. It was about preserving them. A record of lives that might vanish without warning. Each shot, each painted background, each line of dialogue became a defiance of impermanence.
They didn't know it yet, but the subtle frays of their world were only beginning. The rooftop, once a sanctuary, would soon become a monument — the only proof that four teenagers, lost to fire and memory, had ever lived at all.
And in their obsession, they were unafraid.
Because what mattered was not the world that watched, but the world they built.