At twenty-seven, YouTube sensation Ben Leonards is married to his work. If he's not whipping up lasagna with a side of science experiments, he's running statistical analysis of bitcoin during explosive behavior periods.
When a friend asks him to org...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
It might be the first day in my memory when I do nothing. I eat again, when my stomach is empty, because the grieving book said taking care of exercise and nutrition helps with the process, reinforces the body's ability to live through it. The rest of the day I lie on various surfaces of my house, as I catalog the ten years I've spent with Tall in my life.
The leather couch is soft but springy and the skin of my arms gets stuck to it, after a while. The tile floor in the kitchen is cool, hard and probably my favorite place, but I can't spread my arms and legs much. The rug in the living room is my least favorite. It's itchy and doesn't soften the hardness of the wood floor, it also has a faint smell of a wet animal I've never noticed before.
The wood floor is not as cool as the tile, it's sleeker and I make snow angels on it by moving my arms and legs at the same time, dragging my limbs across it and feeling the bumps of each board run across my skin. The shag carpet upstairs is the worst. It reaches out and touches my skin with a million of tiny tentacles, the imaginary tiny spiders crawls from it and onto me. I flick them off and they immediately come back. They are not real and I know it, but I keep flicking.
I get back into bed and sleep and wake and sleep again, hoping I'll feel something that fits the grief template of the outside world, hoping I can be the man Tall so emphatically told me I am. That caring, kind person he saw might've been only a reflection of him. Without Tall I've lost my resource library of typical human behavior.
My phone rings when I'm in the kitchen making myself a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich for what could be dinner or supper, it's late enough. It's Amelie's ringtone and I want to hear her voice.
"Hello, this is Ben." I know she knows it's me, she's calling my number, but the reply comes automatically. I wait for her "hi" or "how are you" and hear nothing.
"Are you there? Can you hear me?" Getting a call from Amelie with silence on the other end brings back the spidery feeling of the carpet, even though I'm standing on the tile floor of the kitchen.
"I'm here. It's nice to hear your voice." It's so fucking nice to hear hers, but it barely recognizable as Amelie. A nasal quality aggravates the scratchy sick tone of someone with a cold.
"You don't sound like yourself," I say.
"Overuse. I'll have to avoid talking this weekend."
This weekend is in a day and in all my lying on the floor doing nothing my mind was working and I made plans, lots of plans, many tasks and activities that are on several lists on my phone. Next ten days of my life have a schedule for every hour and a supplementary activities in case I finish the ones on the list faster. "I'll be packing up Tall's apartment then. Linda will need to choose the books she's taking to the library. Are you coming?"
"I don't know." After a pause she follow up with, "I'd rather not if you don't need me. You've seen the will then as well?"
I haven't seen it, but don't need to read it, because I've been there with Tall when he added the latest amendment. "My copy was waiting for me here when I got back from New York last night. Sounds like you've read it?"
