Imagine you met the woman of every man’s dreams and fell in love, told her first, then you made a couple of very costly but truly innocent errors and made a grave mistake in white-lying to try and put her mind at ease and broke the trust that you both valued so dearly then coronavirus came while you were working in a big hospital you had only just started a new job at and you were loving but didn’t know what you were doing half the time because you moved there to challenge yourself and it was scary and you had only just done CPR for the first time on someone on life-support just before the world started falling apart around you sitting at home with their toilet paper and losing jobs and 2 of your close work colleagues got diagnosed with cancer and she asked where you saw yourself and what you wanted and with her you knew but you couldn’t express it and you wanted nothing but to give and receive intimacy with her and the TV show you made her watch was actually all about a writer that simply wanted nothing more than to be with his only daughter and her mother and you were part Italian and you saw the hell in the corridors of Italy to Pavarotti in March 2020 and the professors and doctors at your work were terrified so you made a skateboard to take your mind off it and your parents were fighting because your youngest of 3, any only other unmarried brother was very scared and unwell and estranged himself from the family and you were on call for heart attacks and your dad thought your mum was being unfaithful but she wasn’t and you couldn’t go to the gym and the sex was amazing for you but you mildly injured your love utensil (100% better now) and you hadn’t bought a house but you should have and your workmate sent you an instrumental music playlist to get your mind off it and lift your spirits and it momentarily distracted you and 3 of your closest friends were a music producer, GP finishing his training and a psychiatrist and you went to watch horror movies with her friend who had an implanted defibrillator and you felt very uneasy when all you wanted was for her to accept you and the movie was terrible and you were uncomfortable with the situation and you screwed up and broke her heart and couldn’t forgive yourself and she had been hurt before but you broke her even more like the song she sent you that hit the charts soon after so you tried to fix it and you couldn’t forgive yourself then she had to leave you in a long and drawn out way after she quoted Star Wars on that sleepless night with the ticking clock the last time you expressed how you felt about her and she knitted you a scarf with her ageing Grandmother whom you loved and you could feel her moving on and were seeing all the signs and you felt more alone than ever on your 32nd birthday and noticed her link up with a younger hot musician/mechanic/pilot dude with Subarus but you didn’t want to lose her so you watched every get-your-ex-back video in the universe on the commute to and from the hospital then the skateboard you made got stolen and you reversed your car into a BMW then later the thoughts you had were thoughts you never could’ve imagined, picturing a leaf floating down a river, locking your past mistakes and losses in a box, then all four of your car tyres got slashed on the other side of town and a friendly Eastern-European-Australian single father missing a few teeth helped you jack your car up and fit 4 mismatched tyres in the rain so you could drive home and then her close friend reached out to open a lucky egg for best friends in Pokémon that you used to play together so you tried your luck with her then a friend-of-your-best-friend became your saviour by inviting you on jogs down the beach together as your friends all got married and had children then your best friend who was there when you met her and whom you wanted to be best man at your wedding whom you had opened up to about her started seeing her behind your back and you had to stop seeing the mutual friend/saviour whom you ran with and it divided your long-term friendship group and then you met a couple of Australian-Croats playing blackjack while on call and they were hilarious and the one in a Metallica shirt got kicked out of the casino (walked out by 7 security staff) but did nothing wrong and he asked you to meet him at the gentlemen’s club so you did and you met an amazing artist who had to turn to dancing/pornographic acting to make ends meet after she lost her job because of the pandemic who just happened to have ADHD and showered you with platonic affection and attention and you became friends and you never slept with her but parted ways then on your long and treacherous, lonely road to recovery your other younger brother’s friend invited you out for a bike ride on a bike an esteemed cardiologist had “lent” to you that you had to put new pedals on after finding a helmet that fit your big head and then you had a chance to make amends I guess at the place you met her after discovering Smule although you couldn’t sing well and you knew and had just heard that she certainly could then she took you by the hand at the place you first met and you weren’t going to go but you locked yourself out of your parents’ house but she didn’t want to hear it or wait a moment longer while her friend miraculously forgave so you wrote one big really long run-on sentence that nobody read to the end but it felt good to let it all out because you loved music more than you ever did before after you couldn’t bear it for about a year and you forgave yourself, and in losing her you lost what felt like everything and she walked away but somehow you had her to thank because you learned to be yourself and express yourself in ways you never could before and you were saved and will always remember her smile.