Yes, and only if my own true love was waitin',
Yes, and if I could hear her heart a-softly poundin',
Only if she was lyin' by me,
Then I'd lie in my bed once again
It's the last image he sees, the one he wants to see, before reaching for the garden sheers. It's the one he himself took just before she climbed into her makeshift bed in the makeshift sleepover arrangement in the middle of her living room. That was only hours ago, he muses.
Cam had gone through the logic of it all. His parents could now focus on his siblings, who sorely needed the attention because of the vested and unbalanced attention he received for his hockey career. His Ice Hound teammates could now shine in their own right for prospective hockey scouts, without him in the lead. And then there was Maya.
He thumbs his way through countless pictures in his phone just to see hers. And it's the same sudden jolt that strikes him in the middle of his chest when he sees her, all blue, doe eyes and rosy cheeks. For a moment, the chaos and gripping sadness clears when he sees her bright-eyed and not knowing how she arrests him with her smile.
She really doesn't know the way she changes him, how there is always a distinct increase of thumping in his chest whenever he sees blonde, how he calms after he arrives home from every hockey practice to smell that some of his clothing has her lingering scent, and how her sadness triggers him to push through his, to pull her out of what he feels everyday.
And then Zig's mocking enters his thoughts. She can never go where his mind goes, she can never suffer the way he does. The truth of the matter is, Maya Matlin, with all her light and the life ahead of her, cannot fall because he falls. He won't let it happen.
Alli says there's always a way, but she never specified which way was best.
He wishes he could feel light again, the way he scarcely remembers what it felt like when he was younger. Then, he would be able to daydream of what he chooses to see: picking up a paintbrush to paint the way he always enjoyed in grade school, picking up the creative writing courses he knew he'd excelled in rather than worrying about hockey finals, telling Maya that even if they went to colleges provinces apart, they'd always find a way back to each other, and, though it's always been a fleeting, playful idea he's only thought of once since meeting Maya, he'd finally tell his parents he'd be having his own family.
Campbell Saunders is a psycho, they say. So, when the best laid plans, the ones he so desperately wants to believe are his, seem so impossible now, as if that life belongs to someone else, he starts to believe he truly is what they say he is.
His hands are numb when he puts his phone down, and Maya's face blurs and fades into the black screen. He grabs for the sheers by the gardenias, and takes the blade to his wrist, its cold steel flush against his skin. He cuts vertically because he knows there is no way he will be stitched up properly in time, and it will hasten his departure.
As the cut bleeds out, he sits down next to the table that props him up, watching the blood pool over his jeans. He feels dazed, but he fights his last fight to grab at his phone one last time. A final viewing of Maya reminds him of the last bit of desperate clinging he has left in him.
Her smile.
The warmth she brings seeps out slower, so he savours it because it's then that he realizes that this will be the last time he will drag her down with him.
He never got to say goodbye.
