The Springbok: Part 7

Still Ben

It took months before Ben felt like the silence in Canada was something he could live inside, rather than just survive. At first, it had felt like the absence of home. But slowly, carefully, it began to feel like its own kind of presence, different, but not empty.

By spring, the snow began to melt. Green pushed through the thaw. Birds returned, and with them, sound. Not the clatter and alarm of Johannesburg, but soft whistles, gentle calls. Life, slow and steady.

Ben had a new routine. He walked to school with his backpack slung low and his sketchbook tucked inside. Sometimes, he stayed late at the library. He found a corner where the sun hit just right in the afternoons, and he would draw for hours.

His pictures had changed again. They still held echoes of fear, of longing, but they also carried threads of something else: healing. He drew bridges no longer broken. Cities at dusk, not in flames. Children standing in fields, faces turned toward a pale northern sun.

One day, his art teacher noticed.

“Do you want to submit something for the spring exhibition?” she asked.

Ben blinked. “I can?”

“Absolutely.” She looked over his shoulder at the page. “Your work says a lot. Even the quiet parts.”

That night, Ben told Elsa.

She hugged him so tightly he couldn’t breathe for a second. “You’re starting to bloom here, my liefie.”

Ben wasn’t sure what blooming felt like. But the word stayed with him.

He submitted a piece called Two Homes. It showed a boy standing on the back of an elephant walking through snow. Behind him, a lion watched from a hillside. Ahead, the CN Tower glowed. Above them, the sky was torn open with stars.

People stopped to look at it during the exhibition. One man, an older artist from Ghana, asked him what it meant.

“It means I’m still here,” Ben said. “Even when I’m split in two.”

The man nodded solemnly. “Then you’re stronger than most.”

After that, Ben kept drawing. Every day. He started a blog, encouraged by his teacher. He scanned his sketches and wrote small captions: “Memory of heat.” “Sound of gates.” “First snow.”

Sometimes Tshepo wrote back. Not always in words, just a like, or a fire emoji, or once a photo of one of Ben’s old sketches pinned to his bedroom wall. It was the bridge. The one they built together.

Willem, too, seemed to shift. He whistled sometimes when he worked in the garage. On weekends, he fixed up bikes for the neighbour's kids. He was thinner now, and his hair had gone greyer, but there was light behind his eyes again.

Elsa took up painting. Abstract stuff, colour and motion, emotions turned into swirls and streaks. She said it helped her sleep. At night, the living room smelled like acrylic and chamomile.

Ben’s last drawing of the school year was of their apartment building. Not dramatic, not metaphorical.

Just home. But on the rooftop, he added something no one else could see unless they looked close: a boy, arms wide, holding a paper airplane that trailed fire and stars.

He named it: Still Ben.

Because he was. Not whole. Not unchanged. But rooted, somehow. Even if part of his heart still lived under the South African sun.

And that, he realized, was okay.

He didn’t need to erase where he came from to belong where he was.

He just needed to keep building, one sketch, one word, one memory at a time.

Still here. Still drawing. Still Ben.

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