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co4ched · 1 month ago

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@mindsafe

derelict cabin’s silence only permits ever—present eeriness to pervade through the emptiness of every room. ensconced in one such room, ben is afforded precious little solace in inked words upon the yellowed pages of the magus. contradictory as it may be to the very idea of sanity, the lack of bickering’s ordinary unending sonority drives his mind to distraction ; hands that bite with the growing cold of the harsh wind & shake with starvation snap novel’s covers shut.

tired brain replays the narrative he must retell daily : travis and natalie will return with a deer. shauna will take a knife to its throat. misty and mari will oversee its cooking, and he will eat it equal parts guilty & proud. pride for the manner in which his girls have stepped up to the plate / guilt for the loss of grip on the authority so easily torn from him as a plane ripped from the sky.

he isn’t the only one. it’s a fumble to wrap freezing fingers around the wood of a wonky stick masquerading as a crutch ; it’s humiliation’s finest trick to fill the cabin with the sound of his attempts at something so simple for the others as rising from the tomb of his bed & entering the living room. but ben seeks the only other soul who dares take up space so UNEARNED as he does.

dark, tired eyes land on jackie taylor, so uncharacteristic in how the wilderness has shrouded her in shadow. admittedly, teenage girls are not the best of company to keep — ben has no say in the matter. for failed coach to hobble across the floor and sit by failed captain is a better thing than to stew in silence locked away.

“you got, uh, room for me to sit ?” the ache to fix the disruption of her power as he would have one of the girls’ hangovers a year ago is cavernous with its longing. he couldn’t if he tried. he cannot assign her a place in the wilderness the way he could on the field. but maybe he can still help — the closest to an adult to lean on. “the others still not back yet ?” if ever there was a kind way to ask if she still hasn’t decided to help the others …

a coach with no authority, and a captain with no influence. they can sit, completely useless together.

#ben vc heyyyyy how's the wilderness-induced trauma going #what's this? my starter ten years too late? never!#. 🩸 : SCRIPT. ⌖ if a coward dies a thousand times.

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co4ched · 1 month ago

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i was always more interested in paul being the blackmailer than melissa. or — i should amend — than it being just melissa. because yj from paul’s point of view is Also a fucking nightmare.

think about it. you’re paul. you fight with ben because you’re ready for something he’s not, and even though it ends in you saying he should go ... you still wanted him to be the person you spent the rest of your life with. which means whatever relationship you have is probably serious enough that you think he’ll come back after nationals week is up with a trophy under his arm ; and he’ll have cooled off, and you’ll have cooled off, and you’ll TALK ABOUT IT.

but the landline never rings to tell you he landed safely & he’s sorry. so maybe he’s still pissed. that’s fine. you’re still kind of pissed, too. you go about your day, and everything’s fine until you turn on the evening news.

and suddenly your ex—boyfriend is just fucking everywhere. he’s in newspapers, and in the mouths of the old ladies with wagging tongues at the supermarket. if the news isn’t talking about the vanished soccer coach, it’s talking about his girls, who you feel like you know from how much he’s told you about them. ( he’s worried about tai & van. you think it’s sweet that he wants to tuck their secret right next to his own in his chest, where it’s SAFE. he doesn’t like mr. matthews. he does like that natalie is so true to herself, even if he worries about what goes on at home. )

he’s everywhere, but he’s very pointedly not with you. you are never permitted a moment’s peace : even when you turn off the television & the radio, you can only wonder where he is.

because you don’t know if he’s alive and awaiting rescue, or if he’s dead at the bottom of a heap of burnt metal somewhere at the floor of a freezing lake. was he a sole survivor in a wreckage full of the bodies of the girls he was supposed to protect ? or did they survive, with their coach dead in the ground ? ben is suddenly schrodinger’s cat. he’s alive and dead at the same time, and you’re not sure you’ll ever know the truth. that is not a situation conducive to moving on. how can you grieve without knowing whether there’s even anything to grieve ? hope, in this situation, is oppressive.

days tick into weeks into months. you lose your friends, because they don’t know why you’re drowning. ben was closeted. there’s not much you can say. publicizing your pain is not a luxury you are afforded.

you’re a writer, so all you can do is write. you write letters ben will never receive, and screenplays and novels that mirror a little too closely all the things you’ve never said ; they’re tucked away in a drawer where nobody else will ever read them.

you begin to think you were wrong. if you could turn back the time, you’d not push so hard. maybe you’d wait. better to wait for ben to be ready than for news of his corpse being found. better to have him quietly than have him not be anywhere at all.

& then it happens. on a day just as empty as all the others, the survivors come home. the news won’t disclose names. there’s one man among them. you hope it’s ben, but then you feel guilty for hoping it’s ben, because that would mean the deaths of two young boys. you’re just somebody that ben used to know. even if you weren’t, you don’t get the luxuries straight couples do. so you know, bitterly, it’s his parents who’ll get the call. and they won’t really care regardless of what they’re told.

in the end, you find out he’s dead from the paper. he’s just a name listed among the deceased. black ink on a yellowed page opens schrodinger’s box : the cat is dead. according to the girls & travis, it was the whole time. they’re achingly vague.

you try to believe them, but ... despite efforts to bring home the bodies of the lost to their families for proper burial, ben is never recovered. the rest of the world finds flaw in the ambiguity of the girls’ statements too. maybe your gut instinct is right, or maybe you’re being spurred on by denial that everything is so simple and so devastating, but you start to look. you pushed ben out the door. the least you can do is find out what happened to him.

maybe you do start writing a book. something non-fiction this time. something that takes twenty—five years. something that leads you to the doors of grieving families. maybe it becomes about laura lee, too, because you remember how ben used to tell you that she meant well, and how her faith was based in kindness, even though it made him a little uncomfortable how often she insisted on pre-game prayer. maybe it becomes about javi, because you remember the days ben would slam the door shut from frustration, & if coach martinez was as harsh a father as he was a boss ...

you gain something akin to a purpose gathering the stories of the dead. ben would’ve wanted someone to remember the kids for who they were, not who their parents and peers see them as. if you’re remembering ben, why not add the rest of the dead to your plate ? and if, years down the line, the survivors begin to make noise again ? if that leads you to reinvigorated investigation ? to a tape ?

maybe that makes you snap. maybe you just ... want them to know someone knows. maybe you just want them to know they can’t leave all those bodies in the cold and live their own lives.

#. 🩸 : RUMINATION. ⌖ in the woods somewhere.#paul i love you paul

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