Did you meditate? Did you travel to distant planes and pluck yourself an unsuspecting meal from among your fellow travelers? I don’t know. I know that my automated monitoring system showed minimum arousal and no call for attention. Honestly, maybe you just slept. You’ve been working so hard lately. No work to do now but wait. A spider in her web; except the fly will be impaled on your fangs without you lifting a finger.

The stallholder’s exit, you keep to yourself: I’m out of the house. You make a pamper session of it, taking a glass of wine you’d already started, and lighting the scented candles. Music plays as you murder your toilet bowl. Say one thing for German cooking, and apparently the Germans themselves: they are physically dense. It feels like shovelling slabs of nearly-set concrete from your bowels. Each new log slaps the surface of the water like a belly-flop; tears come to your eyes once or twice.

“Good morning.” We didn’t make it upstairs. You wake up tangled in a blanket you used to stuff inside an oversized T-shirt. How long ago that was… “Mmlm. What time is it?” Light from still-closed curtains spears into your eyes, making you squint and hold up a hand. I adjust the curtains. “One of your favourite times.” A wet splortch originates from somewhere deep within the tangled system south of your stomach.

Your place is peaceful, silent, deserted. Did you tidy before we met up? It feels weird to think of a vampiress with at least a three-digit meal count doing the hoovering. But all is neat. All is calm. The front door slams open. You practically fall through, and I almost fall on top of you. Clearly I’d been sandwiching you against the door. You’re giggly but oh so heavy, meaning your laugh is light but your thighs strain with the effort of redirecting your fall.

Night falls early at this time of year. It’s easy not to go outside, so I dragged you out. “It’ll be worth it, promise. It’s naff but it’s a lot of fun in a naff way.” And by now we’re both hyperactive on sugar. “Ich liebe das Christkindlmarkt,” you say, sucking giant chocolate-covered marshmallows off sticks with machine regularity. People step aside to avoid bumping into you in the narrow avenues between stalls.

I called my tulpa CLU, as a joke from that Tron film I made you watch one time. CLU lives in my laptop when I’m not interacting with it. CLU looks to you in the aether like a magpie whose wings shade to invisibility at the tips. “Had to be a corvid of some sort,” I explained when you first met it. “And the invisible wings I don’t understand. Maybe something to do with the initial and terminal objects of the category I was thinking about when I instantiated it.

Sometimes, by bad luck (yours), good luck (theirs), or bad timing, a person who you attempt to seduce escapes. I know, right? Doesn’t seem real. It doesn’t mean they’re safe. One day you’re home, famished after a delicate evocation that lasted hours. The contents of the fridge are gone or already south of your navel. I’m away and you don’t feel like hunting. So you think about one that got away…

Today you had important work to do, but you still made the time to come see me. Even just a quick wrap of your arms from behind as I chopped onions in the kitchen—you could tell I appreciated it by the softening of my shoulders. Even despite the way I had to arch backwards to mould around your belly, the way it squished into my back. Grief does weird things to me.

I don’t respond to a text you randomly send, which is unusual enough to stand out. While driving back from some engagement you’re in my neighborhood and a little peckish, so you nip round to check up. My car is in the driveway. It plinks as it cools down: I must not have been home long. You let yourself in with your key. I’m in the living room, and today the smile I give you when I first see you is uncharacteristically faint.

Here’s the thing about filling jars with rocks, stones, sand, and water. The metaphor didn’t work if the jar empties itself. You’re snuggled up on the settee under a blanket, playing through the Sky Base Zone, when your stomach by some awesome effort emits a sound like a gas vent forcing air up through layers of sediment and mud. I’m curled up with my back against your legs, almost at ground zero.