The 1001st shutter of the Ricoh GR3 was frozen in the moment when Jiang Yubai raised his head and drank medicine. The boy's neck was stretched like a string of despair, and his Adam's apple rolled with the secret that Su Qingqing had not been able to reveal for three summers - those deliberately missed basketball trajectories were the encounter formula he used to measure the body of an advanced stage of hereditary bone cancer.
Su Qingqing, the "ghost of waste film" in the photography club, never knew that the film gear under Jiang Yubai's wristband was the camera part she lost three years ago, nor did she know that the "27" he painted fluorescently at every football game was not a battle cry, but a countdown to chemotherapy. The gardenia-scented band-aid in the infirmary was wrapped with morphine medicine that the boy secretly exchanged. Just as he lied about collecting expired films for art, he actually hid the fragments of his suicide note in each film box.
The championship medal in the heavy rain revealed the bloody truth: at the age of twelve, Jiang Yubai had already shattered the tip of the kidnapper's knife with glass beads in front of the shooting booth; at the age of fifteen, on the night when she was diagnosed, he stuffed a bloody band-aid into her locker by moonlight. When Su Qingqing finally pieced together the verses on the back of 37 rolls of film, the ripples on the ECG monitor in the emergency room resonated with the chemical formula "QING?" Rewritten on his sneakers - that was the last love letter he left to her, engraved with eternity in the name of poison.
In the photo that was finally developed, the boy turned around and smiled on the rooftop where they first met, with a cicada that had never reached summer resting on his collarbone.
Intention: Don't leave any regrets.