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The stone walls of this cell don't feel like a prison; they feel like the cold walls of a church built to condemn men like me.
They say I am here because of my wickedness. Because I loved where I should not have loved. They said I was sick long before I had the words to understand what I felt. Sin, they call it. They tell me to repent, as though love were something a man could scrub from his hands.
They beat me because they believed pain would make me well. It didn't. The bruises lingered for weeks, fading from dark blue into yellow. But the love I carried for him never faded with them. It only became harder to live without.
I told them my sins, and they sharpened their knives. They struck my body until I could hardly stand, but they never reached the part of me that still belongs to him.
When the nights are quiet, I whisper his name into the dark like a prayer. If heaven ever spoke, I heard it every time he said my name. The only peace I have ever known was with him. I can still picture him in his uniform, standing in the pale morning light by the sea, looking so certain while I was afraid of everything.
Then there was Venice.
For a little while, the world forgot to hate us. We walked without looking over our shoulders. I almost forgot what fear felt like.
Perhaps that was my church.
There, no one asked me to explain myself. No one looked twice when we walked side by side. I remember thinking that this—this quiet, ordinary happiness —was all I had ever wanted. Looking back now, I think I knew even then that it could not last. Some places are too gentle for this world to leave untouched.
The days keep passing. They are all much the same now. I wake to the same walls, the same footsteps in the corridor, the same hollow silence after the doors are locked. My body tires more easily than it once did, but memory does not. The days blur together now, yet he never does. They may call me a sinner for the rest of my life, but if loving him is my sin, then it is the only one I will never ask forgiveness for.
I don't know whether I'll ever see my policeman again.