10 to 9. I’m leaving the apartment because I’m meeting the guys, for our ritual.
She comes on the videophone.

I guess we don’t call it a videophone, but that’s what they were calling it in sci fi books and sci fi movies right up until about 1990. I guess we call it video chat. Now that it’s 2008.

This girl she’s in another country and here I am talking to her like it’s no odd thing. She’s in her bedroom and I’m in my living room thousands of miles apart, and then suddenly she’s in my living room, on screen. She smiles big. She always does. It’s a dying art, the way she smiles. Big and earnest, always like it could loose its balance at any moment and fall into a laugh.

“I’m on my way out the door,” I say.

“Aw, where are you going?”

“To meet the guys.”

“Can I show you something?” still smiling.

She puts up a painting to her camera – my screen – except I can’t tell it’s a painting because videophone technology hasn’t been perfected yet, even though it’s 2008.

What she’s holding up is a mash up of chunky squares.

She tells me the title.

“Huevo Rojo,” she giggles.

Like I said, just a mash up of chunky digital squares. No egg in sight. But it’s funny. I didn’t need to see it. I mean I still want to, hope to, and was eagerly looking for a digital picture over email of Huevo Rojo upon return home at 10 to 12.

But I thought about the girl and her work of art all night not because I saw it. But because I know how much she delights in doing, in creating, in pushing around oils on canvas.

Even if it’s complete nonsense to paint an egg in red, it makes all the sense in the world when she smiles large and says, “Can I show you something?”