A girl's voice, possibly May's, says: "All I really wanna do is turn the static back into a signal. But maybe that's the same as dying."
"What's a syma?" Moth asks in the video, off-camera, sharpening a pair of scissors.
"Or maybe syma is just a word we made up so we wouldn't have to say goodbye ." The second half of the tape— SYMA 1, side B —is mostly darkness. Voices whisper. A car engine idles. Someone is crying, or laughing, or both. fylm All I Wanna Do 1998 mtrjm kaml may syma - may syma 1
The tape ends. The camera was found in a storage locker in 2023. No body was ever recovered. The word "syma" appears in no dictionary. On the back of the tape, written in Sharpie, is a final line:
Then, a single clear image: the Kaml Street overpass at 3 AM, shot from the ground looking up. A silhouette leans against the railing. It could be May. It could be Juliet's ghost. The camera zooms in, but the image breaks into static. A girl's voice, possibly May's, says: "All I
All I wanna do / is get back to you / underneath the Kaml Street moon / where the trains cut through / and the syma sings you true.
All I Wanna Do (1998) Logline: A VHS tape labeled only "SYMA 1" holds the final, fragmented recording of a teenager named May, who tried to digitize her soul before the millennium turned. May 14, 1998. 11:47 PM. Voices whisper
"Take one," she says. Then she rewinds the tape, records over it. "Take two. is not a movie. It's a manifesto. If I die before graduation, this is why."
But Juliet is dead. She jumped from the Kaml Street overpass six months ago. May is the one who found the note, folded into a paper crane, hidden inside a mixtape case labeled SYMA 1 .
May doesn't answer. She points the camera at her own wrist, where she has drawn a symbol in blue ballpoint pen: a circle bisected by a jagged line. "Syma is the frequency between radio stations. The static you hear right before a storm takes out the power. It's the sound Juliet was listening to when she jumped."
The camera—a bulky Sony Handycam, the kind that eats batteries like candy—rests on a stack of Seventeen magazines. The red record light blinks. Grainy, over-saturated light fills the frame: a bedroom in suburban Ohio, walls plastered with Polaroids and torn-out pages of Liv Tyler.