The Bitcoin Baby

1

- Hey! At work?

- Hi! Yeah, it's a late night.

- I'm right here next to you, drinking coffee. Do you want me to come by your work and get you a croissant? Or steal you?

- Thank you. That's very sweet, but you don't have to.

- Would that embarrass you?

- Yes, it would. I haven't told anyone about you, and the girls would be very surprised. And I'm tired, I want to go straight home and sleep. It's been a long day.

Twenty minutes to the end of her workday. Twenty eternal minutes, because today, like yesterday and the day before, they will stretch into eternity. We won't meet again, and I'll draw her in my mind, and for the image to be true, I'll go to her Instagram. All the photos have long since been clicked through, revisited dozens if not hundreds of times. Nothing new, but every day I go there. I have my favorite photos, like the one where she's lying in a hammock by the seashore.

- Send me your photo.

- I don't like to be photographed. I'm no good.

- You have great pictures.- I don't.

- Yes, I do! Especially the one where you're so erotic with your beautiful thighs spread out for me.

- Uh-huh! I turned them toward you?

- Of course I did! Or is there someone else?

- Or maybe I'm married?

- You'd say then.

- Mmm.

- Do you have a husband?

- Maybe.

No, of course she doesn't have a husband. We've been messaging for a week now, and it's like a game of making up your own world and sharing it with your neighbor. It's a game that suits us both. I'm creating a world where I'm a very different person than I am in life. In my legend, I'm a card player, a lover of easy drugs and harmless vices. An adventurer, in short. She believes. I like my role, girls like bad guys, don't they? Then, of course, I have to confess to this little lie. Everyone confesses to something. Maybe she doesn't work in a clothing store either. What's so romantic about working as a sales assistant, anyway? My little lie is being absorbed by her truth and will soon dissolve. We should just go from texting to dating. But I guess we're good.

- I was kidding. Of course I don't have a husband.