THE SPACES AMID LOVE

Born on September 17, 1989 and raised in Westerleigh, Staten Island, Sylver is the only daughter and youngest child of four to Benjamin Mooren and Claire Stavros. Claimed to be a miracle by her mother after having given birth to only boys prior, Sylver would grow up to be anything but the debutant her mother would have loved her to be. More like one of the guys, she adopted her middle name, Benji, and left Sylver as a privilege that very few get to call her.
Growing up surrounded by boys, lessons in sports were to be taught and skinned knees were to be worn with honor. There was never a dull moment in the primarily Greek household, the Mooren boys rambunctious and loud while Benji trailed after her much older siblings with a desire to keep up. Laughter never seemed to be on short and Claire's homemade meals could always be smelled from down the block. Cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents; there was hardly a day that some type of event wasn't going on where a family gathering wasn't happening. Tight-knight and well fed, the Mooren's were quite realistically the crazy neighbors people made comedies out of.
It wasn't difficult for Benji to learn the concept of love at an early age, her parents proving to be as madly in love each and every day as they did the first moment they said "I do". A desire and yearning blossomed within the young girl, to have what her parents had so she could cherish it just as preciously as she'd always witnessed. But outside of her longing, she never was very good at expressing her desires. Benji seemingly always suffered from a lack of proper articulation. Words would almost always remain unsaid and a feeling of being unfulfilled burdened her mind. It wasn't until she'd met Aiden during high school that the words she'd been desperate to say were spoken. Three years were spent together, him being the "love" of her life - her first of everything. A child with a wandering imagination hooked on drawing and being spontaneous, the older boy grounded her and encouraged a sense of placement. It wasn't until her final months of high school that she'd found out about his cheating habits. Three years of being with someone and suddenly Benji felt as if she possibly was just incapable of understanding love.
One of the hardest choices of her life was the decision to move to Chicago, applying into a Fine Arts major and immersing herself into her graphics work. But not only did school occupy a majority of her time, but the empty place inside her chest Aiden had claimed suddenly became a growing battle to keep filled. Boys and weed became the norm, rebelling against everything her parents had shown her love was supposed to be like and creating a wall of her own to keep her feelings for others at bay. Benji stuffed her mental closet full of the emotions she didn't want to feel, burying them in the recesses of her mind where she wouldn't have to deal with ideas of rejection and misfortune. But she'd developed her own defense mechanism by degrading herself and forgetting her morals.
It wasn't until the end of her sophomore year of college that the constant sex, alcohol, and drugs started to seem less important. An epiphany of sorts, Benji was beginning to understand the lack of self respect she had for herself. Deciding to call it quits on the life she'd been coping with, the young woman focused more on making friends and spending time trying to build herself back up again. When Wyatt Kovacic finally came into the picture in February of '10, Benji knew she'd found someone worth knowing heartache for. He was the lead singer of a steadily popular growing band, a magician of words and the one person in three years to have captured Benji's heart. Vacations to his home country, Croatia, were taken, week long stays in Vancouver during the olympics spent together; he'd made a promise to never let her down and she'd believed him with every fiber of her being. When the semester ended she moved in, claiming her spot in not only his heart but now in his home, too. She'd proved herself dedicated when news of him having a daughter, Harmony, came out, and willingly offered herself up to help him with his new duties of being a father.
Time spent with Wyatt never seemed to come around enough, however. With the release of his new album coming up, the older man had little time to spend with his girlfriend. They would go on to call it quits at the end of May. Heart broken once again and at a loss of how to handle a life without Wyatt in it, Benji uprooted herself to Boston in order to be closer to home and to reside in the same city as some of her closest and oldest friends. An entire summer was spent wallowing in guilt, grief, and loss; she'd never had the courage to tell him she loved him and no longer could look to the future to tell him so.
Life once again felt meaningless. Old ways were once again adopted and Benji was again back to the habit of constant intoxication. Now living with Kherington King, one of the oldest and most reliable friends in her life, she slowly watched everyone else's lives bloom around her while selfishly wallowing in her own misery. She was lost, alone, forgotten; or so she felt. But then Everett Luther walked into the picture and suddenly the black sky was only looking grey. Having known him from back in the city, and after spending years keeping in touch through letters and phone calls, he was the remedy that put light back into her life. A little less alone, not quite as lost; Everett had a way of making Benji feel like the center of the world with the tiniest of gestures. Once more she was made to second guess everything she'd assumed to be real. Things with him made sense, but at the same time he'd unknowingly created a monster within her that fed off of his affections.
Once again her desperation for love was reawakened. Things seemed to be heading in a positive direction until one phone call changed everything. Deciding to quit school in favor of following her boyfriend to Maine, Benji took it upon herself to try and fix a man seemingly crumbling within her palms. Three months later and she was back in Boston, right where she always started; alone, defeated, and bitter. But not all bad things last, as life proved time and time again. She might have felt stripped bare, but something always managed to turn around for the better. Hitting rock bottom meant having to get back up, and this time it brought her eye to eye with Brady Stevens.
On February 11, 2012, after little more than half a year of dating, Benji made a leap of faith and got married in Vegas. Nothing about this relationship turned out traditional and she can't really say she has any hope for it to be exactly the way she envisioned, but as what's been proven again and again, everything happens for a reason. So she might not have wound up with her first love, or her second, or third. Brady might not be the knight in shinning armor, and sometimes he turns into the dark cloud she needs a silver lining for. It's not precisely what her parents have, no, but it's the most complete she's ever felt. This was what life was preparing her for. It's not perfect, but it's whole.