The sunglasses are back, but thankfully I only put them on when I know no one can see, as a bit of a joke. You seem annoyed. Your mouth is set and grim as you meet me in the IT suite. The tech closet is a graveyard of dead machines no one is confident enough to dispose of. Small whiteboards on the wall track some out of date networking bollocks from ten years ago, the temporary ink faded and make permanent by time.

There’s a knock at my door and I’m upstairs. Your musical voice rings out: “I’ll get it!~” I’m kind of busy with my head in my phone and frankly I’m kind of on the loo, so I don’t think twice about it. Then it hits me. Something terrible is about to happen. I scramble down the stairs, still buttoning up jeans and jangling as the buckle of my belt flies about wildly.

Motion. Everything is in motion. Only your arms are fixed, tied together at the wrists and strung up to a hard point in the ceiling. Every other part of you jiggles and bounces as you squat and pull up, squat and pull up, with feverish intensity. (She was a girl whose eye you caught. Days later I brought her to you as a gift: a wrapped-up present you had no intention of unwrapping.

You hold a veil to the mirror that has served you so well these past couple of days. Speculuceps the mirror demon looks out at you, wearing a version of your form lacking any scrap of colour. She, it, whatever, speaks urgently, ducking under the falling fabric to still keep your reflection, and so to have form to speak. “You will consume them all, yes? That was the bargain for the use of my power.

Oftentimes, more often of late, you spend time apart from me. You are busy and frankly parts of your life are inscrutable to me. Your independence is important to us both and while I relish every second you spend with me, I will never ask for more than you naturally give. After all, some day I will spend the rest of my life with you. So I never take the mornings for granted when I can wake with you.

I worship you. Day to day I try to be cool about it. Like, I’m not spontaneously inventing poetry singing your graces, I’m just chopping onions. I’m not earnestly pledging my life and death to your slightest whim, and the lives and deaths of anyone whom your gaze should cross; I am, in fact, participating in a stupid game where we casually poke one another while we’re both doing something else, each trying to get the last touch in.

It took me a couple of days till the cuts healed enough I wasn’t worried about, y’know, bursting. A polo neck and long sleeves isn’t too suspicious in cold weather. I began wondering: am I a battered spouse? The thought makes me chuckle. What we have is objectively so goddamn unusual we don’t fit into any boxes. Anyway. A black polo neck in a post-Halloween goth rave is a weird-girl attractant because I look so obviously like I’m hiding something.

My wife is an arachnophobe. It’s a good thing she was asleep when you came through the wall. Your eyes were visible first. They seem purple against the dark, sometimes. A shadow grew and grew and then… … Each limb piled into my room like an opening fist, round as my thigh, long and articulated. Having taken your foothold in my bedroom your human form emerged, slender and beautiful, followed by an enormous, bulbous abdomen.

While you have been so hard at work, my dear Raven, I’ve been making strides in my meditation practice. The breakthrough was to stop fighting my tendency to view things through a mathematical lens. It turns out the subject matter is so deeply ingrained in me that it serves as a useful symbol set for my subconscious to speak and interact. Seriously, I built a tulpa that was the abstract manifestation of a social graph traversal algorithm.

There’s a way you drape inside a door frame that, when done at the proper time, has a 60% chance of making a woman melt. Forearm up the frame, you cock your hips a little to show off your figure (toned or pudgy), and incline your shoulders and face towards your prey. The pose brings raw physicality and your gaze is intensified in a way you can hear adds ten beats per minute to the heartrate.