-Benjamin Bust-

Upon first glance, there was little of great potential or purpose about him. He was a tall and slender creature of violent nervousness and a quiet, halting disposition, and was never too quick to make judgments or to raise his voice above a murmur. There was an awkward timidity to his movements, and only while he painted did his hand steady and his actions reflect any sort of confidence. It often took more than one try for him to fall into stride, as though he were a violinist meticulously tuning his instrument, and yet somehow the result was always something beautiful. His face was tender and demulcent—like himself—as though every hard line of a jaw or cheekbone had been softened at the edges as one moulds clay. But in reality, he had been worn down like wood beneath the abrasive strokes of sandpaper or the persistent crash of the salty waves that wear deep rivets into the faces of cliffs. And among such softness were the incongruence of a long-broken nose, the pale strokes of scars and the dark circles of transient days and insomniac nights.

            Clearly, he was not a thing of brilliance, no—but surely there was some sort of beauty in the tragic gentleness of his tired green eyes or the lopsided fringe of tawny hair that rustled like the seas of golden brown grass just outside the attic window. Surely there was something profound about the small notch in his right brow, or how his nose crinkled up when he smiled his bracket-cheeked smile and the rare laugh that throbbed from inside him with as much truculent hope and soft-spoken vitality as the blood in his veins and the heart in his chest. And surely there was importance to the mellifluous lilting of his voice and his desperation to protect in others what he had lost himself too long ago to recover—to cling to the goodness in life, now so elusive and just out of his grasp. To keep human beings from suffering like he had suffered was his purpose, but somewhere along the way, he lost himself.

            So there was precious little brilliance in his face or figure—no evidence of anything extraordinary, or anything that mattered, or anything at all besides stooped shoulders and a gold star sewn to his breast. There was just a broken boy with constellations of freckles and a voice like the desperate prayers inside the walls of a hospital and eyes that held a million different universes as a child holds water in cupped hands. And yet, he was still the most brilliant creature she had ever seen.