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Ben

Aston Lester

    He walked East toward the sun. Young, tall, lanky, awkward and in angst. Thick Light brown hair almost blonde that stood up in strange ways. As strange as he felt and was. This was Ben, and he walked toward the bus stop to catch a bus to Leia. He was a musician and a songwriter, and she a poet, in his mind a better artist than him. He was phone-less since he had broken his the week before in a fit of anger and confusion, and so his arrival would be a surprise to her and this worried him the closer and closer he got to the bus stop. He got there he kept walking.
    When she had broken up with him, he remembered feeling the same as he did when his best friend died, and it made him feel guilty and selfish. A cardinal flew overhead. He walked for a long time, until the sun circled and hovered behind him. He found a park and laid down in the grass and stared up at the cloudless sky. Into the endless blue. Or so it appeared to him.
    The songs that he wrote were mostly all sad ones and when he tried to write a happy one, it came out false. He sat on a pew in the back as Harry’s mother read his obituary, and he wondered why he wasn’t crying. Maybe he was all out of tears. That night he sat around a campfire and drank beer with old friends, and they told stories of Harry, then it all fell out of him at once. He didn’t want to cry in front of his friends but the tears wouldn’t stop coming. He saw him lying there in a casket, or not him but the vessel that remained. He thought of that and how he’d never talk to him again.
    He woke up in the park, still lying on the grass. The sun was long gone as was its warmth. He stood and walked the rest of the way to Leia’s apartment building. When he arrived, he knew it was late but didn’t know how late. He pressed the buzzer to 39C and waited. Leia voice came through the machine at the door. Her voice was raspy from deep sleep. Ben hesitated. He wondered if this was the kind of behavior that she told him about during their arguments.
    “It’s Ben.”
    There was a pause. He reached for the button again to apologize and leave, but there was a click at the door.
    “It’s open,” she said.
    He entered the building and went up to 39C, knocked on the door, and Leia opened it with half opened eyes and in her pjs. Ben walked into the apartment. She offered him a drink. He took a beer and so did she.
    “What time is it,” he asked.
    “It’s eleven.”
    “Oh, I thought it was later.”
    She sighed. “Why didn’t you call?”
    “When?”
    “Before you came here.”
    “My phone is broke.”
    “Oh. So... what is it?”
    He told her how he never apologized and then apologized, and how he knew it was his fault, how he was self destructive and unwell. He told her he was trying to get better, and that he didn’t need that anymore. He thought he needed it, the sadness and the drinking and the drugs and the anger, in order to be an artist but that he realized that it was just a lie he told himself and everyone else so he didn’t have to change, but he was tired of not changing while the rest of the world changed around him, how rockstars waited till they were rockstars before they lost their shit, and he was still a nobody so he should save it, and how he just wanted to be her friend, truly and not just to get back with her.
    She forgave him and asked had he been writing.
    “Yea but nothing good lately.”
    “You always say that, and it’s always great. You just can’t see it.”
    He asked her had she been writing. She told him that she hadn’t in a while. That she hadn’t been inspired lately, but she wrote her mom a letter a couple of weeks ago. Ben asked to read it. She read it to him. It was about their tumultuous relationship and how they found their way back to each other. Ben thought it was beautiful and wished the world could read her writing.
    In the night of the morning, Ben walked along an empty street and was happy to be Leia’s friend. He knew that he might not feel the same tomorrow and might want her back again, but for the moment all was perfect and the blue wasn’t there. Maybe it wasn’t endless. He could see the universe for what it was and the stars glinted through the city lights.

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