Ben Hughes, a 22 year-old failure, has never known success. He's heard of it and he's dreamt of it, but it seems to have always slipped through his fingers. Taunted by his mother, and judged by the world, Ben decides to take matters into his own han...
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Ben eventually had to force himself to get up and off the floor. He couldn't sit around moping the whole day. No, he needed to forget Pepe el. What was it that people did when they needed to get over the end of a relationship? Eat ice-cream and pile on the pounds? Ben shuddered at the thought. He had been a fairly chubby guy in his younger years even up the point when he had gotten his job writing junk mail, but as he'd started managing his father's business, Ben had begun to use the little time he had left over every day to start working out. He didn't buy a gym membership, thinking that everyone would stare at him, so Ben went online and looked up fitness videos. Over the five years he'd been working out with the videos, Ben had lost his baby fat and had gotten slimmer. He thought that it told people that he liked to look after himself, which somehow translated into good business and more money, which was essentially more success for Ben.
Ben decided that a brutal workout would take his mind off his traitorous best friend, so Ben logged into his laptop, deleted his background image (a picture of Ben rolling Pepe el, who was pretending to be a bowling ball, down a bowling alley) and looked up a video. When he found the one he wanted, Ben began doing a brief warm-up and then his workout and then finally a cool down and stretch. With every jumping jack, bicycle crunch and back bow, Ben felt better and more empowered for some odd reason. He was so focused on getting through the sets of exercises that he began to forget his fight, until he thought about sending the workout link to Pepe el (who was also trying to get fit) and remembered the traitor.
"Damn you, Pepe el!" Ben screamed, looking up at the sky. "I thought you were my friend."
There was something very sad about Ben's cry of rage and anguish and hurt. Ben had spent his entire life being betrayed. From the moment he had been born, his mother had rejected his love in favour of government benefits and then he'd remained clueless about her feelings until he was twenty two years old. He hadn't been able to go to a proper university because of her deadly grip over her savings, and his father had left and then come back and then been taken away from Ben again. And now there was Pepe el, who Ben had accepted as a brother, a confidante and a best friend. He'd thought that he and Pepe el would grow old together and live in a bungalow (as their knees would grow to be too weak for climbing stairs) and they'd play bingo and point their walking sticks at the youth. Who else could he do all that and more with?
Ben went to get his daily protein and while he boiled an egg, he looked out of the window and into the distance and thought about how Pepe el had changed. And then Ben looked down at the boiling water that covered his egg, and tried to think of a deep and meaningful metaphor that could describe his relationship with Pepe el. Their relationship had been like an egg, he thought. It had had many layers and it had started off not being fully formed, like the liquid inside an egg. And over time, the layers had become more solid, like egg whites and egg yolk. But then something - Andrew Davis - had come along and cracked their relationship into tiny pieces, as Ben was doing with the egg shell so he could eat the egg inside.
