I keep imagining that, when the world will return to normalcy, I will have moved back to where I thought I belonged and we will meet by chance in a coffee shop, like we used to do at the start of our story. 

In my fantasy, you will stare at me and not say hello, like many times before. Why? I never asked and I shall never know. Silly me, I used to mistake the complimentary hypotheses born in my head as explanations. Shyness, stalking behaviour, doubt about whether you were forgiven yet? Maybe you wanted to see what I would do when I thought you weren’t looking. 

In my fantasy, after I notice you staring I greet you and go about my day as nothing happened, as I could not appeal to any excuse to dig up a grave that I dug but that you scouted and pointed to many times, while I hung on to you like a flag to a poll. It gets cold up there, and, during a blizzard, all you can hope is that the synthetic polyester fibres that keep you tied together are strong enough to endure.

In my fantasy, I hastily get out of the door and replay the encounter in my thoughts, wishing you’d handed me a shovel and, with an out of character act of chivalry, dusted off the first layer of dust that accumulated on the grave. While digging, I could have told you that I got hurt. Whose fault was it? That’s just part of the narrative, while the truth is that I offered you my pulsing heart and you squished it as you wished. Now it is bruised, still throbbing from the pressure. Then as you felt lonely or a bit bored, you reached for my tape and told me to mend it. The next phase of the game was sticking needles in it, for an endurance test. The needle that finally made it flinch for its safety was the request to accept being poked while you were finding your next toy. Or, as I hope for you, a woman that was worth a better treatment. Not sticking around to find out which of the two happened was my last crime.