You Again

My aunt had my mother cremated into several pieces of jewelry that she shared amongst her closest relatives. I say her closest relatives because I was never close with anyone from my mother’s side of the family. I screamed my 15-year-old lungs out at my aunt when I found out. I absolutely hated the idea of my mother being made into flashy things when she had never been a flashy person and worse – never even liked most of the people that were now wearing her about. I had vowed never to wear the ring my aunt had designed “especially” for me as a protest to properly honor my mother.

Nevertheless, I’d finally taken to wearing the diamond ring that was two-thirds her about a year ago; a hefty 9 years after her passing. I was a nervous wreck at the time because it was my first day at my dream job and I suppose I needed a little support. Shortly after that, I began wearing her specifically on my ring finger to keep the office creep away from pursuing me. I thought it a strangely mix of right and wrong wearing her both for support and to fake like I was married.

That’s what today felt like. A strangely mix of right and wrong. The wind blew a caressing cool sweet breeze while bearing the weight of screams and cries of mass hysteria from sea to shining sea. The flower blossoms from the redbud trees sprinkled the town’s streets in their usual colorful parade along with the trash and debris accumulated from all the looted surrounding shops. I’d ventured out into town for reasons unknown to me. I suppose I wanted to see if everyone agreed with the news reports that said this was our last day on Earth.

I’d gotten my answer before even fully arriving in town with how people were using the roads and lack thereof as if they were competing in a street race. Once I actually got around to the shops, I quickly regretted my search for confirmation when I bared witness to hordes of people attacking everything and everyone they could manage to get their hands on. There was fighting over everything from first aid supplies to weapons - a chaos that only added to the fear that you were going to die soon. Two men even ran up to my car and tried to smash my windows out in an attempt to hijack my car before I sped out of there. Where they planned to take my car once they got it and what all of those fighting people thought they were going to do with all those supplies was lost on me. The Bedrock 9 was a cluster of significant sized asteroids headed our way that would obliterate Earth upon contact not an alien invasion to be fought.

I drove to the next nowhere just long enough for my hands to stop shaking. I made sure to stop somewhere that seemed safe and quiet and thought how silly that was considering what was about to happen within the next 18 hours. I sat in my car’s silence trying to come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t going to have a tomorrow. I’d done this on several occasions within the last 63 hours when we learned the last hail mary attempt to change the course of the largest asteroid since the dinosaur age had failed and only split the large asteroid into pieces that would still ensure our last days.

I hadn’t cried yet and wondered if it were just shock or if something were really wrong with me. I hadn’t been genuinely happy in a long time, but surely I wasn’t indifferent to my time on Earth expiring, right? I lived alone and it had been that way for 3 years now since Denny and I broke up. I never minded living alone. Something about being lonely had nestled its way deep inside me and made me feel like an imposter anytime I tried to escape by clinging to other people. It’d been that way since my mother passed. She’d been the only family I ever had since I never knew my father and didn’t have any siblings or other relatives that lived nearby.

My thoughts were interrupted when I heard a strange pop and a holler that trailed closely behind it. It startled me at first until I realized the holler was more celebratory. Was someone actually celebrating at a time like this? It was one thing not to cry about your impending death and quite another to celebrate it. When I realized the familiar place I was in, I allowed curiosity to get the better of me and ventured out to investigate.

I had parked next to the empty canal with the long desolate highway bridge that ran across it – same one that myself and several kids had made into a play area when a nearby park had been closed for several months. I remembered even after the park reopened fully remodeled, we continued to play in the canal that was free of parental eyes. A wave of nostalgia that I didn’t expect flooded over me as I looked out over it now as a dying adult. There was a tingle of peace in the nostalgia remembering a wild and carefree girl that used to roam about here.

“Kara Samuels?” I heard a peculiarly familiar voice call out from the side of me. I stood frozen for a few moments a bit shocked that I could run into anyone that knew me, while still trying to correctly identify this person just by their voice. I had to call my losses and turn to him when I could feel how close he was getting.

“…Ben Kingsley?” I asked more so to question the coincidence than I did of his identity. His big bright smile and lively head of curls had made it impossible to misplace him since the 4th grade.

He paused a few paces away from me with his mouth half open in a stunned smile.

“…A-HA! No way! Kara Samuels?! Now I know for sure today’s my last day,” he laughed turning his face a glistening reddish color. The playful bite in his tone helped jog the last memory I had of him from the time capsule that was all things that wild and carefree girl of the past buried deep within me. I felt a few pings of shame blip inside me and, of course, it helped matters that he saw the memory take hold of me. Just watching him bite the inside of his lip with another chuckle almost made me want to retreat back to my car. Only almost though.

“Yeah, you got it – Ben Kingsley,” he said with a smirk. “I’m surprised you remember my name all things considering…”

“What are you doing here?” I asked specifically to stall that part of my impending judgement a bit longer. He raised the empty soda bottle in his hand and pointed to the canal with it.

“Ain’t it obvious? I’m shootin’ off water rockets of course!”

As I stared down into the canal, I could see a few more empty soda bottles and a bike pump. I hadn’t even felt the smile creep up on my face as the memories of a dozen or so kids rampaging the canal with hoots and hollers seeped to mind as they competed to launch water rockets higher than the next kid.

“Come on! Come see how I did, Mad Scientist,” he teased with a title I hadn’t gone by since the last time I was here.

“What – now?” I asked finding the idea of playing games at a time like this odd. He stopped to turn back towards me with a raised eyebrow.

“No, certainly I meant tomorrow.”

“It’s just…shouldn’t we find some place to pray or meditate or something? I said realizing then I didn’t actually want to do any of those things.

“I did that for the last few days already. Alone and over the phone with my family that I don’t have enough time to get back to. Now I’m here.” He answered letting his eyes lose a bit of their spark for a few moments before reconnecting with mine. “And so are you, so what’d ya say?”

I looked from him to the canal, then back to my car. I had nowhere to go. No loved ones to see, and even though I couldn’t seem to cry, my stomach kept tying in knots every time I thought of the next 18 hours. It was nauseating at this point.

“…Rockets it is I suppose…Ben Times Ten,” I poked with a shrug. He threw his head back in laughter as we began down the cemented slope of the canal. “Hey, you were just mad your name didn’t rhyme with anything. Ben Times Ten had to climb all the way up here to retrieve this one, I have you know,” he said waving the empty soda bottle. “Pretty sure I’ve demolished your high score at this point, Mads.”

“And it only took you 18 years,” I teased with pride.

“OoOo, you better still be able to back that up once we get down here.”

“Oh, I am not launching anything – ”

“To hell you aren’t. How could you not especially once you see Ben Times Ten’s exclusive upgrades. See, look at this!” He ran over to point at the wet mess he’d made all by himself. I had to laugh at the soggy cardboard rocket tip and fins he’d painted designs on that were still attached to the empty soda bottles that were littered about.

“Wow, yeah – no, I stand corrected. You’ve really outdone yourself here.”

“You haven’t even seen the best part.” He bent down then to the bike pump spout or, “launch pad,” and clicked a green laser light that illuminated the soda bottle he placed on top. “Pretty cool, huh?!”

“…That part is pretty cool actually,” I obliged him from a Mad Scientist point of view.

“Yup! K, I’m going to launch first to remind you how it’s done since you’re old now and then it’s your turn.”

“Oh, it’s just me who’s old?”

“Yeah, just you so pay attention,” he teased.

I was genuinely intrigued watching him set up realizing that I hadn’t forgotten a thing other than how loud and messy it was. With just the first launch I was soaked with having failed to step back far enough. Ben Times Ten couldn’t get enough of my shocked reaction until I proved the Mad Scientist was ageless and sent my rocket nearly out of sight. Of course, he couldn’t accept that time had change nothing and tried again and again to top me to no avail.

The two of us were soaked down to our socks with no sense of time just like when we were kids. In fact, had it not been for the nearby gunshots and loud shouts creeping closer and closer to us, we probably would have stayed there shooting rockets until the very end. Instead, we hurried back to his childhood home around the corner just as the night really began to set in.

I’d left the last possession I had behind, which was my car. When I left my house earlier I had every intention of returning to die alone amongst my material things. Now, all I had was my soggy clothes and my flashy mother on my hand. Ben was kind enough to lend me some of his dry clothes. I stared at the mirror with them on longer than I planned to. This was to be the last of me. The last time I would look myself in the face. The last set of clothes I would wear. The last house I’d breathe in. My last night to live through. To say that it was jarring was an understatement.

“You clean up well, Mads,” a now dry Ben said from behind me as he leaned his shoulder into the side of the wall. As I looked at him through the mirror, I felt my stomach beginning to twist again creating a soft and quiet quake of tremors throughout my body. I was beginning to feel it seep out of the time capsule to well up finally after all this time and if I didn’t let it out now I’d probably explode like one of those rockets and that would be a shame to waste my last 10 hours.

“I didn’t mean to stand you up at prom, Ben,” I said to him through the mirror. I could tell from the subtle expression that flashed across his face that he wasn’t expecting me to mention it. He started to say that it was ok and wave me out of the mood I’d slumped into, but I needed to tell someone my truth. I wanted someone to have known even a speck of the real me that I’d kept deep within before none of it mattered anymore.

“No – please, let me say this. It’s important to me,” I said with my eyes beginning to well up red. “I never had any intention of skipping out on you and everyone else then, let alone for the rest of my life. The truth is that by the night of our senior prom I’d already been transferred from a two day hospital stay to a behavioral health facility for…getting a head start on tomorrow, I guess you could say…I had never even thought of doing such a thing before that day, but it was just…”

I paused a moment to try to gather myself to no avail. I had graduated to a blubbering emotional bomb and the only way back down now was as falling debris. “…My mother’s birthday was the week before prom. We’d always talked about how exciting it was going to be for me to go to prom and what kind of dress I might like to wear. She’d been gone for 3 years already by then, so now here I was standing alone in that house with no one to share that experience with. My aunt was gone on a business trip and my best friend, Kat, had moved away the prior summer. I just…lost it. By the time it was all said and done, I’d completed a 30-day rehabilitation program where I re-emerged so tucked within myself that all I was left with was a shell of a girl. I was a coward too. I was too afraid to face you or anyone else for that matter, so I just didn’t. I convinced my aunt to let me finish high school tucked within the house and once that was done, I flew as far away as I could to college to leave it all behind. And I’m so sorry I did that, Ben. I should have told you- “

“Kara, honestly it’s okay and I’m not just saying that to make you feel better,” he said moving to put his arm around me. “I was upset and confused at the time, but now I’m just sorry I chose to sit in my ill feelings instead of truly trying to reach out to you like a real friend would have. Truth is, it was never fun growing up in this house. I spent so much time trying to spend as much time away from it as I could all my life and I made it everyone else’s responsibility to help me do it without them even knowing it. I did the same with you as a friend that when you left, I made myself the victim without even questioning what you were going through. For that, I’m sorry too.”

We turned to each other then and hugged deeply. Probably the deepest I’d ever hugged someone since my mother. It was everything I never knew I needed and helped soothe the aches and quakes. After that we shared a laugh at the thought of how we never could have imagined our endings being like this together. We were grateful though, that we were given even that mercy of each other.

The rest of the night was spent on true Ben Times Ten and Mad Scientist time. We placed old board games he’d found in old corners of his house, shared our End of The World playlists with each, and ate Hot Pockets and popcorn as our final meal.

By dawn we were sitting on his roof watching the sky take on colors we had never seen it take. We leaned on each other and sat in silence for the rest of it. I wore my mother on my hand and thought of how happy I was to have her there and Ben. I had found peace at last as the world caved in and was most thankful for that mercy.