BB Grey–musings

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The screen glowed in the 2:30 AM stillness, a sudden star in the domestic dark of his bedroom. Her text bloomed, then vanished, a digital ghost that left its afterimage on his retinas. Arlo fumbled for the phone, pressing it awake. He didn’t bother with his glasses; his nearsightedness was a loyal servant in the intimate dark. It was farsightedness, the ability to see what was coming, to parse the distant future, that had always been the problem.

The message:
Who do you see when you stare into that photo, and what does it say to you?

On an Arthur-his-brother level, it was simple enough: “Remember this picture?” Arthur’s texts were glorious in their bluntness: Dude you watchin this game? The Redskins are killing it! which translated neatly to: I’m sharing uncomplicated joy with you.

But Annie’s words were never just words. They were a set of tumblers in a lock, a Zen koan wrapped in a riddle, dipped in the honey of vulnerability. To Arlo, her text also asked: Do you see me the way I see myself? Are we holding the same memory? Are we even living in the same universe?

He wondered, not for the first time, if he would love her the same if it were all simple. Perhaps, in the cosmic chaos of life and relationships, a particularly twisty corner of The Twilight Zone, her complexity was the very gravity that kept him in orbit, the push and pull he couldn’t live without.

He read the text again. The question demanded a thesis, and all he had were 2:30 AM thoughts and thumbs accustomed to clumsy typing. He decided to generalize—his first mistake, but hell, it was 2:30 AM. The answer existed on two planes:

1. What do I see?
2. What does it say?

On the Arthur level: It was a Saturday. He’d reserved timed entry at Huntington Gardens, a peace offering in the middle of one of their cold wars. She was fifteen minutes late, a minor eternity he filled rehearsing irritation. Then she emerged from her car, a sunspot in dappled light.

She was a vision in crab-orange corduroy, a sleeveless dress hitting mid-thigh. Gold hair tumbling forward, jewelry jangling like a private percussion section. Sophia Loren sunglasses, though likely from the dollar store. She smelled faintly of a flower unnamed, as if discovered that morning. In an instant, the wait evaporated. His smile spread across laugh-lines she’d carved into him over the years.

“You made it,” he said, words doubling as blanket absolution. He inventoried the beauty he could, on occasion, call “his woman.” Today was such a day. Two days ago, he wasn’t so sure. Hence, the gardens.

So simply: In the photo, he saw an impossibly beautiful woman who said, I am with you. It validated him. He hated needing that, but he did. And she gave it.

Then came the other level—the dissertation level, with footnotes on heartache and hope. There, he saw himself: older, tired, best years maybe already stomped out, left with memories on life support. And he saw her: fire. A reason for warmth, yes, but also a blaze that could consume. A light that revealed everything, even what he’d rather not see.

The photo said he still had hope. It whispered that the finer things in life were still his for the taking, that the struggle had been worth it for this single, crystallized instant. It begged him to forget what came before, to stop trying to manage and fix what would come after—the moments he’d reason into corners, get wrong, and then drown in the resignation of having tried.

He was overthinking. He always overthought. A chorus of voices had told him so. But he thought in silence, so he lived in silence. The line returned, the one from The Bridge of San Luis Rey he’d made his own: “She lived alone, and thought alone.” A hammer blow of truth in its simplicity.

His reply would have to be a compromise. A short-story version of the PhD thesis. A small, digestible fragment. Something she might hold onto, but mostly something to remind himself. A permission slip to live in the breath between now and then, to savor this day when it resurfaced in memory.

Like Swiss chocolate, nibbled from the edges, never consumed all at once. That was how he savored her: careful, rationed, so the sweetness lingered longer.

That was Arlo. That was Annie.

And so, with clumsy thumbs and sleep-heavy eyes, he sent his answer, hoping the words on the screen matched the epic in his head. Two universes, somehow aligned.

“I’m in love with you.”

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