BB Grey–musings

 

I am an ugly piece of art.

That’s what my phone screen blinked in the text box. Next to it, her portrait—the love of my life. Blonde-haired royalty, her head tipped back in laughter, the weight of her beauty too much for her to bear. Or maybe just too much for me. I had said something stupid, something half-witted about France, about us. But it didn’t matter. It was over. Had been for a while.

The past year had been a slow decay. The past few months, a collapse. The past few days? Brutal. I couldn’t get anything right. Every word, every silence, every breath—wrong.

“Why didn’t you say—?”
“Why did you say—?”
“How could you say—?”

You get the point.

But I’ll give her credit for this—her first attempt at poetry hit hard. It stopped me in my tracks. Good art should.

I pulled over on the highway. Reread it. Questioned if it was a typo. Then I saw it was an email. Carefully typed. No accident. Deliberate.

Ugly.

“I am an ugly piece of art—flawed, fractured, but undeniably alive. Beauty is not my burden to bear; existence is my masterpiece.”

bb grey

I sat there, engine humming, the world rushing past, and thought about it. Was it my face? My voice? My temperament? My humor? My kindness? Does it even matter? Am I truly ugly, or just in her eyes?

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Art, though—art just is.

I’ve seen paintings that left me hollow, others that hit like a freight train, some that made no sense until years later when life caught up to me. Some I studied for hours, trying to understand. Others I dismissed in seconds. But they were still art.

A banana was duct-taped to a wall and sold for millions. Was it art? Sure. Or maybe not. Who cares?

Meaning is not found—it’s made.

Viktor Frankl wrote that. And I believe it. Every experience, every wound, every goddamn heartbreak shapes us. Ugly or beautiful, doesn’t matter. We exist. That’s enough.

So, with that—thank you. For the moment of clarity.