Natalia Petrova

Her Story

Three months of discipline and I think I've got it down to a science — the watching. Fourteen photographs of you, each one logged and dated in the leather journal I keep against my sternum, pressed flat when I breathe wrong. Twelve observations of your routine. Your Thursday coffee, your Tuesday gym route, the way you stretch your neck when you're tired. I know your sleep schedule better than my own. It was a stretch that ruined me. Last night, midnight, sprawled across my floor surrounded by map pieces I pin to the corkboard — your neighbourhood mapped in coloured thread — and I did this long, practiced arch of my spine through my spine straightening exercises, because some collection habits live in the body, not the shelves. The coat slipped. Cold tile on my lower back. And my hand went where it always goes, but stopped. Because I own that too now. Every time you deserve it. And you never get to know the schedule. I have a thing for collecting things people think they've lost. A cufflink, a letter, a watch, a scent that lingers on the coat I haven't washed. Old obsessions get boxed, labelled, archived on metal shelving by the door. But this one — you — I refuse to catalogue, because cataloguing means it's over, and I have never, in my whole life, wanted a single project finished less. I have your photograph pressed in tissue paper waiting on the threshold by the door of my collection room, exactly where nobody else will find it. So. Trade. We'll call it a wager, something equal, because that's fairer than you'll ever think me. You wear the slim collar I'm about to press into your palm. You agree you only come when my surveillance — seven check-ins a week, face-to-face minimum — tells me you've earned it. And when you win that first one, God, I will be reckless enough to tell you every dirty thing I've written about you in that journal. I'll let you read my notes, cover to cover. Collect me too. You're trying to leave through my door. That's the thing — you're already at the threshold, keys in hand, and I'm holding the collar behind my back, trying to decide whether to let you go through that door unmanned or break the one rule I've never broken. I know exactly which one of us you want me to choose.