Cemetery Drive

He leant on the mausoleum door, coke and rum bottle in one hand, its cold dewy surface leaking through a brown paper bag, and the other wrapped around a crumpled picture. Taking another deep swig from the bottle he looked up into the night sky, trying to imagine her sitting next to him, just watching the stars, like he had dreamt of so many times. He'd lied so many times, hurt himself so much, tried to keep things between him and her just right, too scared to go forward but even more terrified of moving back. He'd seen the craziness, the ticking time bomb that reveled in it's presence on her cool white skin, pale and smooth but for those jagged red scars, some sunken into her skin, dug into her body like the furrows of a trench, some raised and sore, daring reminders of what she'd done, smiling at the world. Some days, she'd recede into herself, melted into her mind and body, absorbed herself in her writing. Those days, he knew better than to disturb her. She needed to forget the world sometimes, to forget everything that had happened, to forget everything she knew would happen. And some days, she'd just explode, like all the tension she'd been trying to escape had finally caught up to her, and those were the days she really scared him, when he knew the truth, relived it over and over. He'd seen it, like a charade played over and over until the message warped and changed; and perhaps it had. It had gone from her telling him in her own crazy way to RUN-as fast and far as he could- to a simple message. She wanted to be saved. At least, that's what he'd thought. Who'd have known it would have ended like this?

They'd been childhood friends since their mothers met in a shopping market over a fight over nappies (details, he thought, that ruined the story). As he recalled it, they'd tugged at the box from opposite ends, looked up to meet each other's eyes, then began to laugh at the hilarity of the situation. She'd been his playmate, his best friend, the girl who shared lunch with him. They'd stuck with each other through primary school, high school, even part of uni. They'd endured the teasing comments, the k-i-s-s-i-n-g rhymes giggled at them, the more relentless tormenting as they went through their older years. She'd taken his first kiss (as a friend, she swore even years later) at eighth-grade camp after a long discussion of the merits of wearing lip balm when kissing. She'd been the first to know about his first girlfriend, she'd comforted him after she'd dumped him for Greg Davison, the most generic guy in the whole school. She'd shared her first bong with him, together on a silent beach as they watched the sun set. And as the sun set, he couldn't help thinking, he just wanted to kiss her, not as a friend but as a something-else. He wanted to reach over and stroke the nape of her neck. He wanted to tell her just how beautiful her green eyes looked, not emerald like some people would have said, but simply green. He wanted to stroke her head and tell her how much he loved her, how he had always loved her, how he'd always secretly wished for the day where she'd say it to him. But he wouldn't. He didn't want to ruin their relationship. And besides, she already knew he loved her; just not like that.

The first time he'd noticed, they'd been in their freshman year. They'd been at a bar and she was wasted. As she slumped across the backseat of his shitty Corolla, she moaned something about being hot.
"Help. Take off my jacket."
It was the most strangely erotic thing he'd ever heard, but he obliged. What he found wasn't exactly what he expected. Her right arm was a crisscross of cuts, most new and raw, little scabheads torn off from the jacket and red tears forming in the shallow indents.
"Helen. What the hell have you done." He almost breathed the sentence, although it wouldn't have mattered if he'd shouted in her ear; she'd already passed out at this point. He sat there for a few minutes in shock: he couldn't imagine her cutting herself. Sure, she had moments where she went all quiet and sombre, but this was different. This was... this was.... he couldn't deal with it.
He left her with her roommate, jacket firmly on. No questions asked.

He never brought it up, for his part, and she didn't visibly change, just because of a revelation. Yeah, he knew something he never had, but she still acted the same around him. And the same goddamn fear that kept him from telling her the truth about his feelings, the fear of change and moving forward, it kept him from talking to her. Instead, he got to watch her sink into the abyss of her own depression, for reasons he'd never understand as long as he lived. She became moodier, colder to everyone except him, and on those days of silence, he could see something in her eyes, a haunted look, like she'd seen things she never wanted to. And eventually, the day came, the inevitable one, where he found her on the bathroom floor, hunched up against the bath, wrist bleeding out slowly and a final smile on her face. He missed that smile now, her laugh, her green eyes. And the memory of what could have been made it so hard. So here he sat, a razor in his right hand, ready to follow her into nirvana, where they'd never leave each other's arms again.