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A/N: So, this is the result when I’ve got a challenge to fulfil and my mind is decidedly, unfortunately, empty.

I hope you liked it and that it made you think, or in bluebell’s case that it made her cry! …Because that doesn’t sound odd at all… or that you just thought it was an interesting read. But either way I’d love your thoughts on it. ;) Thanks for reading. Bethan. x

NB before you begin:

*this paragraph is a whole chunk of indirect speech plugged together and said in the tones of many different people so I apologise for any confusion on that part.

Inspired by this quotation by Alan Watt:




Bennie Owen's Diary 2024


Sometimes you reach the point where you start wondering when you stopped being and simply existed. You wonder when the point was that you became detached and you began floating, like an astronaut let loose into space, no longer a man joined onto a rocket. You’re separated from it all. Emotions, relationships, people, life.

But sometimes the astronauts drift too far, and there’s little hope left for getting them back. They’ll just burn up as they get closer to the Sun or suffocate through the atmosphere of another planet, and sometimes they just fade.

I think I had faded. I didn’t do anything extravagant, nothing that, though short-lived, would be remembered for a long time, and I didn’t fall into a panicked frenzy and go on a desperate rampage somewhere, eager for that final thrill. I just drifted, which was the lonelier, more pathetic process than all the others really.

---

There are so many people who offer so many things in life: money, sex, drugs, help for one or all three of those, and yet when I really needed someone’s help, they couldn’t give it. I’d like to blame everyone for my misfortunes, I really would, and I’d like to talk about the injustice of the world and society and how no one did anything for me. And though those things were true, I also didn’t for it. I was silent through it all, and I never stretched out the helpless hand to begin with.

It could have been laziness, or shame, or cowardice, or simply uncertainty⎯who knows, maybe all four of those things⎯but either way I didn’t stretch out my weedy pale arm and ask. It was as much fault mine, as it was theirs, and it still is. Mine, that is.

You always hear people saying that every person has meaning, and that every person matters, but what if you truly don’t? Not in the way that you’re conflicted and you hate yourself or that you’re angry with the world around you, but the feeling of genuine uselessness. That horrible feeling where you stand in a room and feel guilty for taking up someone’s split-second thought about you, when they could have been thinking about more important things, or taking up space and taking someone else’s oxygen though it was dispensed pretty freely.

Because that’s what I felt. I didn’t have any friends, I wasn’t smart; I was plain-looking, someone who would dissolve into a crowd and maybe get stood on a few times, and also I was more than certain that no one would miss me.

Sure, a tear or two would be shed around because that’s just how some people react to death and some people beneath me would cry because of the horror or the simple shock, but real connected emotion wouldn’t come into it. They wouldn’t be crying because of me. They wouldn’t be upset or see the body as me, just as ‘another miserable kid who’s thrown their life away that I happened to know’.

All that I could possibly be given at the end of this tunnel, one where there was no light but just an infinite blackness, was a few days⎯or weeks if people really had nothing better to do⎯of gossip that would circulate around that *Bennie⎯no, Bernard⎯no, Ben kid who threw himself off the top of the astronomy tower because he probably wanted attention and there was always something bloody creepy about him and I always knew he was sad and that there was something special about him⎯a lot like me, really, but he never talked to me when I asked him if he was okay so if you like, think about it, he, like, he brought it upon himself, y’know?

You see, the problem with people is that some of them are so stupid they really have no idea how stupid they are and how stupid they sound. But that’s just my opinion.

---

I’m not afraid of death, even though I know it will be the right thing to fear at the time, because it’s something I have been contemplating for a while now. The students and the people who have another eighty years ahead of them won’t fear death, though. Death is simply another topic at the rumour mill, though perhaps a headier topic than most⎯one with implications and rules and boundaries, but sometimes even those are erased, until death becomes a joke, and a means to an end but not one that people expect to experience soon.

I wonder if my own will be added to the stockpile, or if it will simply lay buried again, hidden at the bottom of the heap. Will it instil fear in others? Or will the reminder of their ultimate ending that I give simply be as fleeting as my leaving, my passing that will occur in the space of a breath.

There’s no chance of surviving the fall, I’m sure of that; just as sure as I am that the number of people that will miss me will amount to the rounded figure of zero.

I’ve written something like that twice now. I wonder if the one thing that upsets me is that people won’t miss me. As much as they all annoyed the shit out of me, there was still a small part of me filled with a longing: a pinprick sized hole somewhere around my solar plexus that aches for that to be true. I’ve walked around the school as a ghost; the living-dead; a student simply left to haunt those more fortunate, and a remnant of what they could have been and should have been and perhaps were.

---

As human beings we are programmed to fight and to survive and live, and yet I’m sure to defy it in that moment. I’ll be a master of something for once in my life and I’ll be able to break the rules. Some could argue that I had lost the will to live, but I’ve simply been left to ponder the thought silently that perhaps there’s something different “out there” for me. I'm doubtful, but I'm lost, and I've no where else to turn.

Of course the adrenaline and the ‘fight or flight’ instinct kicked in in the last few moments, and my arms and legs started to flail and a lump was working its way up my throat and I think I may have even whimpered a tiny, pathetic sound, but that was simply a mechanism. It was something we are all prepared for. Even though I had accepted the matter and I was a hand-span away from the ground, there was still something inside me that wanted to fight, that would feel a failure if I didn’t at least try. Even those who have truly given up have that inside of them; they’re just too tired and beyond hope to go and put up the struggle looking for it.

---

I was often known as ‘that odd Slytherin with the scary stare’. Diane told me it was because I looked at people with such intensity that they felt like I was seeing through them or seeing into them. I didn’t understand how that could work⎯nothing puzzled me more than the minds of other people. She said I had a slight quirk to my mouth, too, like I was smiling, but not out of kindness. She said I smiled a lot, like the world was a secret joke only I was clever enough to understand. I was hardly bright, not like Rose Weasley or the rest of that fame-born clan, so that puzzled me, too.

When I looked in the mirror after she had said this to me, I didn’t see what she said I looked like. The image I had built up in my mind from her words suggested I was a little mad, but the light that reflected back showed nothing but dull old me. Brown hair, brown eyes, soft, rounded jaw, lips a little thin, nose a little big. Well, ‘dull’ was up for debate.

---

My mum’s letter went a little like this:

I’m sorry I failed you, Mum.

It was only six words, but there was no way to possibly encapsulate my thoughts and feelings into words⎯she would have either understood the meaning behind my actions and the hastily scratched apology or she wouldn’t. It really was that simple.

She’d never expected much of me, mostly because I’d never expected much from myself, but I still felt like she deserved something after the wasted years raising me and making me a somewhat-decent person. I didn’t feel guilty for leaving her⎯she had my scholarly sister to fill in the gap big enough for the both of us⎯but I felt guilty for having wasted her time and her money and her tiresome effort having to look after a kid that she didn’t really care for all that much and that didn’t really care for anyone else all that much.

I wasn’t sure if she’d keep that letter for sentimental value or just throw it into the fire during the heated moments of anger and perhaps anguish, and perhaps even sorrow if we pushed it a bit and pretended we all loved each other a bit more.

I wasn’t one for strong, bonding relationships. I kept to myself and stayed quiet out of a general abhorrence for the dull conversation around me than anything to do with my rumoured nervousness or shyness, and even if I had chosen to tell anyone about my final, ultimate decision, I doubt they would have taken me seriously enough anyway. If I’d told Ryan⎯a boy much like me though rather more odd and therefore noticed⎯he would have wanted to know why. Why I felt like I did and why I’d reached my morbid conclusion and what the reasoning behind everything was.

He may as well have asked me what the meaning of Life was, and my uncertain answer would be more depressing and confusing than the question itself: There is no meaning.

---

I had hoped that the teachers would listen, too, though they weren’t high ones. They were my last resort, despite their constant efforts to let us know that they were there for us and that we weren’t alone. Their promises and their declarations of guardianship were short lived and empty, unfortunately. Professor Lewis had written in my termly report: ‘Gets on well with others, seems to enjoy working by himself.’ I didn’t get on well with others, I just wasn’t rude to them, and I didn’t enjoy working by myself, it was just that no one would work with me. I was lost, and they hadn’t batted an eyelid when I truly needed it.

Professor Vine was too busy sneaking cake back to his office and tugging his belted trousers over his questionably sized stomach to stop and listen to me, and one look at Professor Lionel’s face and I knew he’d talk me out of it. He always talked me out of bad decisions, but I really didn’t want him to this time. For once I wanted him to tell me that I was right and that my thoughts and opinions mattered, rather than listening to him splay out the vast pool of his wisdom and youthful intelligence that made me feel more like a child and more foolish and more pointless than ever. This time his opinion wouldn’t matter.

He could talk and talk and talk and eventually he’d realise that not everyone wanted to listen. Which was the case with a lot of people.

When people open their mouths, they assume that everyone is terribly interested in what they have to say or what they experienced, and that the people that are seemingly listening are really hanging off their every word. It never crosses their mind that people don’t want to listen, and that they really don’t care what you have to say because it just doesn’t matter to me and it just doesn’t effect me in any way and you’re just. Not. That. Important.

That’s what I want to say to all those people, all those people incessantly talking and making noises and sounds without meaning, and holding themselves up on higher ground than everyone around them.

If they thought me high-strung they’d tell me to join in or relax, or my favourite one: Let go. Did they realise what they were saying? Did they not understand how bone-achingly hard it would be just to bunch up all my problems and worries and fears into one balloon, and let go of the string? It was impossible. And had I tried it the fragile casing of that balloon would have popped far too soon, leaving me just as scattered and bedraggled as before. Just as lost.

---

I keep adding these short paragraphs day-by-day. In my History of Magic lessons, when Professor Binns goes off on another of his tangents and students are lazily doodling on the desks and some are drooling into the crooks of their elbows, and at lunch or dinner or breakfast when I’m sat on my own adding another cube of sugar to my already too-sweet tea, or when I’m lying in bed at night, listening to Kieran and Ryan and Ivan and Mathew snore. I’m always wide-awake in those moments, even when my mind is dragging its way miles behind me and begging me to slow down, but that’s when I write these.

I’ve read them all now, and I really do sound like the depressed little shit that I dreaded turning into, but often when we see things, we forget to remind ourselves that there is another option, and in doing we convince ourselves that the one outcome we have created is our inevitable demise, because we never looked to anything else, just waited patiently for all we thought we were destined for.

‘Bennie, stop!’ Diane screams. Her blue eyes are wider than I’ve ever seen them before. I can’t help but think that her expression of terror is the most beautiful I’ve seen on her face. She’s got a hand reached out towards me as my toes curl over the ledge, and I see that outstretched hand like a lifeline, but a hand one would see in a hall of mirrors⎯it’s a potent reminder of all the things I could have done, all the simple things with simple solutions.

I realise then that if I had stretched out my arm, I still would have needed to step forwards, and even then there were more jerky movements and more tiring steps to go after that. I hadn’t the energy to lift my arm, so how would I have survived those next movements to salvation?

I give her a half-hearted salute, the one we used to give each another in the corridor. Her hand is always clutched in his now, so I don’t give mine anymore if I know she can’t return it.

I’ll miss her. I really will. She’s one of the good ones, and she’s the only one that made anything the tiniest bit worthwhile, but not even she noticed my downward descent into this state of hopeless self-loathing. I used to think she was the greatest thing that ever happened to me, but that was before I realised a lot of other people did, too, and what we had wasn’t really that special.

I’m not offing myself because of her. That’s just stupid. But I will say that she has been one of the contributing factors. I actually tried with her when it came down to it, but even she was one to leave me hanging. When it all came down to it, no matter how many hours I had spent wiping away her tears after another git treated her like she didn’t deserve any better (it never occurred to her that I might be a normal⎯if fleeting⎯choice for once) and spent hours comforting her that I could have spent with my often-avoided counsellor, she didn’t really care all that much.

And anyway, when all these stupid words I’d written down over the year popped into my head the second before I hit the ground, a sight that some people below, milling lazily about in the warm summer’s afternoon would never forget, I realised that I didn’t care all that much, either.

Because this was not living, and I had yet to find out what life was.