Everything Ben

Those custom designs…

It had put him on the map for a while, garnering interest from a couple of surf brands who wanted to buy it but Craig, he’d refused to sell out. He did enjoy the notoriety though, being the only one out there with an original Craig Cody.

It’s when he tries to do another that he gets stuck, the colours don’t look the same, the shapes out of focus. He hears his mom’s voice in his head, mocking his work, tearing it to pieces before his eyes because Craig… he needed to focus on being part of the family not on his silly drawings.   

It’s the reason he stopped creating back in high school after a couple of local collectors picked up his art at the graduation show. His mom had told him they were pitying him, that they went into the parking lot afterwards and had a good laugh at the derivative piece of shit they’d just paid fifty bucks for.

His creativity withers after that, he hits the coke, loses himself in the drugs, the booze, the women. He doesn’t pick up his paints for years, but he also doesn’t throw them away.

At the party he follows his nose to the source of the kush and there you are standing at the edge of the fire with that spliff between those ruby red lips, your hands up in the air and hips swaying to Offspring’s Want You Bad as that handsewn kimono flows over the white tank top and cut off shorts.

There has never been a woman that moves like you, that loses herself in the music, that lives so entirely for the moment. He’s spent every minute of every day missing you, wishing he’d got in that sky blue 69’ Ford Mustang and took off down the coast when you’d asked.

His arm loops around your waist and you gaze up at him with those eyes, so vibrant and so beautiful that he painted the hue onto his board so that he would never forget it. You remove the spliff from your mouth, blowing the smoke into his own as he kisses you. He groans at the sensation as his hands run through your hair, drinking in the high as it erupts through his system.

Already he can feel all those burned-out synapses bursting to life, his world flooding with colour again as he holds you in his arms for the first time in a year.

The inspiration, he realises it was never the kush, it was you.

Always you.

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