‘Writing together’: They fell in love in a Google doc

April, 2024

The cursor blinked. Blink blink blink, like proof of a heartbeat. And that was when I knew he was there.

“Hi!” he typed. “Are you in here?” The sentence landed fast, like copy and paste.

“I’m here!” I said. “I’m so happy we’re here at the same time! How are you?!” 

It was grown-up instant messenger. No more staring at the speech bubble hanging at the bottom of the screen until your boyfriend hit the return key. Here, our cursors flashed on top of one another. Who could finish their sentences faster? “Wait, did you just type that, or did I?” Laugh emoji. We stayed in there for hours that night, in the same quiet place where only the click clack of our keyboards broke each of our separate silences in each of our separate lives. Click clack. Blink blink. Smile. 

He was the one who started the Google doc: An infinite love letter we could pass back-and-forth, a diary to relent to, a love song, a bedtime story, a comforting cup of tea.

“Let’s write together,” he said. “It can be a space to keep all of our ideas in one place.” I blushed. He wants a place with me? He wants to share anything with me? “Sure,” I shrugged cooly. He invited me into the doc on a Thursday afternoon, already filled with at least 300 words to greet me. 

“What should we write about?” read the first sentence. Then 455 pages followed, 232,102 words, all from a spring to a fall. It scrolled past conversations about sunsets and thunderstorms, memoirs and confessions, Joan Didion and Roland Barthes, Orson Welles and Félix Guattari and about how Francesca should have gotten out of the car at that stoplight in The Bridges of Madison County. “We’d already be in the car together,” he said. 

He typed out poetry from Maggie Smith and Emerson. He typed out lyrics from Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan.

Ramona, come closer

Shut softly your watery eyes

The pangs of your sadness

Will pass as your senses will rise

For the flowers of the city

Though breathlike, get deathlike sometimes

And there’s no use in tryin’

To deal with the dyin’

Though I cannot explain that in lines

In the fall of 1951, my grandfather sent a letter to my grandmother while he was stationed in North Korea. Days or weeks later, it arrived in her mailbox somewhere in the middle of South Dakota. She would sit at her kitchen table in silence, read the pages three times over and weep, and then she would write him back as quickly and tenderly as she could. Within a couple more weeks, her letter would arrive to him, already her updates of life at home long past. My grandmother wrote him 300 letters, each time a kiss on the envelope and a prayer for his safe return. 

“She wrote me a letter every day I was away,” my 96-year-old grandfather says today. “Every single day.”

In 1951, every word was so careful on the page. This was all they had when they endured each of their separate silences in each of their separate lives.

“Ping!” goes my phone notification 70 years later. A line or two was being written in our Google doc. I scurried to read it before his fingers even left his own keyboard. 

“Hey! You’re here!” he said. 

“I can’t stay,” I typed. “I just wanted to say hi!” Smiley face. “I’ll be back soon!” Then he awaited a ping.

A lover’s thoughts are so reckless now – it feels there is so little anticipation left in romance – while my grandmother’s careful letters are still wrapped in a red ribbon in the attic. Life was as slow then as the letters themselves still fade, but the immediacy of our Google doc somehow felt cherished like that, too.

“A treasure chest of secret correspondence,” he wrote. 

“Omgggg we need to sleep!” I said to him at midnight on page 338. “The last time I looked at the clock it was 10:04. How is that even possible?!” 

“I’m so sorry I kept you up so late!” he typed in the sentence that followed mine. “I love you!! Remind me to tell you about the surfing dream tomorrow.” 

I never did hear about the surfing. So much else to share and never enough time online, but even the trite was exhilarating. “I want to watch you brush your teeth,” I said on page 61.

“I just took the dog on a walk,” he said after I asked him about his day. “Then I went to the grocery store to pick up meatloaf from the nicest lady. What did you do today? I miss you, Angela.” 

Our thoughts were a witty banter, an untamed stream of consciousness, the way two teenage girls gossip on the way to the mall. “But there’s also an indescribable flow and rhythm,” he wrote. “You’re like the typewriter of my life. Every indentation on the page feels so special, so meaningful and lasting.”

He made me feel unafraid of my thoughts and emotions. I was awake and bare, for the first time purging fears and curiosities. Our Google doc was my confessional.

“You amuse my emotions, Bobby,” I wrote. “You don’t belittle them, and I think you’re the only one.”

He was a reprieve, a hideaway, a garden for only me to reap, and I wanted to protect all of it. But he wasn’t like that. I recoil in my fear, he bathes in the light.

“There’s a secret place inside of me,” I said. “It’s where you reside, where our love resides. Do you have a place like this, too?”

“It has nothing to do with secrecy,” he said. “It has everything to do with setting our love free, by accepting it, embracing it, and learning from it. Love sets us free.”

Fate snuck in, already on page 6. “I have this extreme conviction that something is emerging between us,” I said. “And whenever it does, I think it will be so subtle and gentle, as if to say, Of course I was coming. You knew me all along.” 

“I am unsparingly yours, Angela,” he wrote. “You are irrevocably mine, Bobby,” I wrote at exactly the same time. 

He pushed me and empowered me to not limit my thinking or my imagination. With him, anything was conceivable. “Let’s write about love to inspire more love,” he wrote on page 136. He was the romantic, I just asked a lot of questions. 

“But why should our love be for someone else?” I asked. “Why would someone else’s love be for me?”

“New love will find its own way,” he assured. “You and I didn’t need someone else’s words to find each other. We only needed each other. I read this from Deleuze and I thought of us: ‘One’s always writing to bring something to life, to free life from where it’s trapped, to trace lines of flight.’ 

“So I suppose the thought is,” he continued as I waited for his sentence to sprawl itself out on the screen, “how do we help people get to a place where they are willing to present themselves in a way that feels honest and deserving of love? Maybe it’s not our words that inspire love, but that they inspire the possibility of it. The act of writing,” he concluded, “usurps the writing itself.” Smiley face.

Our sentences trampled one another. We didn’t have the patience to hit the return key. I would set a thought free on the page, and he would interrupt to respond, in ways you wouldn’t even in person, but he wanted me to know he was there. We were childlike, wild for each other, a dog at the door. 

“Ok, I’m taking a deep breath,” I wrote. “And, hi!” Hug emoji. 

“Hi!” he said. “There you are! Where have you been for the past two days?” 

“DISTRACTED.”

“Ha!”

“Now I’m calm,” I said. “Listen to me.”

“I only listen to you, Angela. Tell me everything! I’m here.”

“The fact that we worry means to me that something is near. If we didn’t worry, or even feel overwhelmed, then perhaps this place would be merely indulgent, but the fact that we cannot leave here, that I long for you the way I do, means that I’m becoming someone I’ve never been before.”

“What does that mean!?” His cursor blinked impatiently.

“What I’m trying to say is that, unlike so many other tediums in life, this writing doesn’t distract me, it represents what I think is going to become the biggest thing in my life, and so whether that begins here or in letters or on a boat, I want to be there.” 

“I have so many smiles in my eyes, Angela. I’m so happy here, too!” he wrote. “This contentment is a stirring, an evocation of life – Live life! It shouts. Live it more! And live it with the one you love.”

On page 32, we wrote that we needed to trust each other, that we needed to “say more” to each other, to always be open, unarmed. “Say More, what a great title for the next great American novel!” he wrote.

Today, I wear a wedding ring he gave me – underneath an olive tree at Mission San Juan Capistrano on a Thursday – that is inscribed with the words “say more.” And we do. 

“Tell me more,” I say to him at the dinner table when he presents another idea. The laptop is closed over there. I don’t look for the cursor anymore. I see him across the room. A loyalty to a Google doc translated into a life.

“There are three of us in this doc, Angela,” he wrote on the second to last page. 

“What?!” I panic. Is there another cursor I am missing? “What do you mean?” I asked. 

“There will always be three of us here,” he wrote. “You, me, and us.”

“Goodnight, my love,” he says. “I hope you sleep and dream!” 

“Goodnight!” I say. “I love you!” 

The cursor disappears, and I sleep and dream.