Tally of Love
A journey through silence, tally marks, and something like hope.
The first time I saw her, the sky was that kind of pale, unfinished blue that only shows up before the heat takes over. Early spring in Monaco. The kind of morning where the light is soft, but everyone’s already pretending it’s summer. There was a line of Ferraris outside the casino and a wedding party taking photos by the Hôtel de Paris. She didn’t fit either picture.
She stepped toward the car with a notebook in one hand and silence in the other. Didn’t say hello—just tapped the window and whispered, “Anywhere quiet.”
So I drove.
I’ve driven heartbreak, ego, inheritance, guilt. But that day, I drove someone trying to measure belief by how often strangers still said the word.
She didn’t ask for music. Didn’t scroll her phone. Just folded her hands in her lap like she was holding something fragile that had no shape. The silence wasn’t awkward—it was deliberate. Like she was tuning the world down just enough to hear what most people talk over. I glanced in the rearview and thought, maybe she wasn’t running from noise, just waiting for the right kind of quiet.
She opened the notebook like it was a compass. Just one word repeated over and over:
Love.
She didn’t look out the window. She looked at people. She watched their mouths, not their eyes. She listened through the noise like someone trying to hear her name called in a crowd. We cruised past yachts bobbing in the port, through the curve of Boulevard Albert I. Tourists with espresso cups. A couple posing on a rented Vespa. And her—counting ghosts.
After ten minutes, I asked, “You writing a poem or something?”
She didn’t look up. “Keeping count.”
“Of what?”
She turned the notebook to me. The word love was written 317 times. One per line.
“I started on a train,” she said after a while. “There was a woman across from me. She answered her phone, laughed, and said ‘I love you’ before hanging up. Then she cried. Just a little. That was number one.” She looked down at the notebook like it was a wound she wasn’t sure had healed right. “I needed a reason not to delete that memory.”