BB Grey–musings

He sat undone.

His left leg folded under him, his right stretched into the pale dark as though it belonged to someone freer. The air at 2:30 slipped through the screen and slid across twelve inches of open window. The blinds caught it, sliced it, and delivered it to his skin with the precision of a memory.

The stillness carried yesterday back to him. The smell of exhaust on the 405, too close and sour. Horns, brakes, fragments of music bleeding from half-opened windows. Engines humming like a single enormous insect gnawing at the asphalt. In that slow-motion crawl he thought of her. Though she was far, a world away in her own busyness, she was never far in truth. Her smile collapsed the miles, folded them neatly like paper. He felt her lean toward him and whisper, Hey, I’m with you. And instantly the freeway fell away.

The Getty was always hers. Theirs. Where it began. He could still see her sitting forward on a wooden bench, completely absorbed by Van Gogh’s Irises. The petals and leaves—green, blue, violet, unnamed shades between—seemed to extend from the canvas to hold her in place. He remembered standing there useless, watching. And then the thought—half memory, half hallucination—of Vincent’s brother’s words: It strikes the eye from afar. It is a beautiful study full of air and life. He thought it fit her better than the painting itself.

And then his mistake—or maybe his salvation. He sat too close, awkwardly, absurdly, like a man about to ruin his chances with one motion. But she only smiled, moved the slightest bit, and released the awkwardness like steam from a kettle. “I feel the same way,” she said, eyes shifting from the painting to him and back again, and in that instant everything fell quiet. Life imitated art, and art imitated life, until the two became inseparable.

Now she was gone.
And he wandered inside that absence.

The memory came to him like a forbidden charm. Too perfect to own, too delicate to summon often. He feared it would fade with use, as a pressed flower fades when handled too much.

So he held it lightly. Smiled. Let her slip back to wherever she lived when not with him. Outside the window, morning had begun its slow wash of yellow. He whispered to no one and to her, Hey, I’m with you.

And for a moment, impossibly, he was.