The Engagement - The Message

     Summer arrived and he became busy with work.  Gone for weeks and months at a time, he seldom saw the girl of whom he had grown so fond.  As each project finished, he would return to the city with a light heart, exhilarated by the thought of being with her again, only to find that she had just left on vacation with her family.  They seemed always to miss each other by just a day.  They still kept in contact, sending the occasional phone or internet message, but the ‘hello’s and ‘I miss you’s couldn’t fill the growing holes they felt inside their hearts.
     As summer wound down, so too did his work.  He found himself more and more in the city until his days away numbered no more than two or three per month.  He sent message after message to the girl he so desperately missed, asking to see her, inviting her on walks, but he received no response.  Time moved forward.  Weeks went by.  A holiday came and went.  But the holiday was not a cheerful one, for he had still heard no word from the girl with acorn eyes and wild hair.
     Then one day he found a message in his inbox.  It was from her.  Immediately, everything was righted and all doubt floated away.  He realized then that she must have been traveling somewhere without quality phone coverage, or had no money on her phone, or had lost his number, or had lost her phone, or had even just been too busy.  Whatever the problem had been, it didn’t matter now, for she had responded and soon enough they would be together, strolling through the crowded streets, side by side, smiling and laughing once again.  Elated, he opened the message and read it eagerly.  There was only one line of writing; four short sentences.  “Hi Tariq.  How are you?  I am engaged.  Take care.”
     The message made sense only once.  He read through it quickly and understood completely.  But when his brain compared this new information with what it already knew to be true, the two were so violently opposed that he immediately doubted that he had read or interpreted the message correctly.  So he went back and tried to read it again, but this time he could find no meaning in the words.  He recognized the letters.  He saw how they combined to create the words and how the words, individually, were all perfectly clear.  These were, in fact, words with significance, words that expressed some thought or idea.  The problem lay in the way in which the words were combined.  Arranged as they were, the words lost all meaning.  He stared at the four sentences, trying to pinpoint the idea they had been intended to convey.  But the longer he stared, the less sense it all made.  The words became hazy; the letters, scrambled and foreign.  The whole line of text morphed and melted together, swirling and dancing on the page until his head hurt.
     Somewhere at the other end of time, he blinked.  Immediately, the screen raced back towards him, bringing with it an idea that nearly knocked him from his seat.  Engaged.  The bottom of his stomach gave way and fell into a murky hole of infinity.  He felt sick.  His head swam.  Questions circled around his brain like out of control satellites, orbiting wildly, spinning faster and faster until finally losing balance, falling of their axes, and crashing into one another in tiny explosions.  How could she be engaged?  It had been barely two months since they had last seen each other.  And only a couple weeks since they last spoke; she had mentioned nothing.  He read the words over and over, convinced he had missed something, convinced he had misread something.  But the words did not change when he read the message again.  The meaning was still the same.  The girl with acorn eyes and wild hair was engaged.