[ | | | | ] I took out a set of clothes that belonged to her, since I didn’t want to be seen in mine. I had to hold her hand most of the time when we were with other people, which would be nice if it weren’t so awkward. If they can see, they can judge, and they will, even if they don’t know it. I’ve seen it. Enough thinking about work, please. She spotted a cat.

[ | | | | ] An adorable cat, young and stray with white, black, and orange all trying to claim it as its own.

[ | | | | ][ | | | | ] And now, me.

[ | | | | ][ | | | | ][ | | | | ] But I can’t handle another life, it’d be better off with someone more responsible, on its own.

[ | | | | ][ | | | | ][ | | | | ][ | | | | ] I ran to a vending machine and bought a can of tuna to give to it.

[ | | | | ][ | | | | ] “How are you so kind to animals you barely know but seem so aloof to colleagues who’ve worked with you for years?”

[ | | | | ] “I try not to, I don’t think I am, but they always say that I do. I’ve stopped trying and just decided to make up for it by doing more work than them.”

“You know, I think that might be making it worse. They’ll probably think you’re trying to outperform them.”

“But I am outperforming them, they appreciate the sentiment. They say that it must be hard for me to think at a human level when the only warmth I get most of the time is from overheating components. I believe that’s true.”

She hesitated for a bit. Oh no.

“I don’t mean to knock your work schedule, I’m content with hol-“

“No, they do have a point though. I’ve only been able to see you twice within the past two weeks. How do you not miss me?” She says, turning to look at me.

“I think of you and the things we’ve already done and just hope that they’ll make do for now as I wait for us to make more.”

“You know, sometimes I wonder which one of us is objectively less human.”

I understood that joke and laughed.

“You’re less human, I’m less of a person.”

“Hmm, fair enough. Look up, the sky’s as breathtaking as always, isn’t it?”

“It’s at that hour where things are just about to turn from day to night. From afternoon to almost evening. The clouds mix and split in this slow, chaotic split that gives us this dim, mellow hue that’s kind of like it’s straight out of an anime movie, isn’t it?”

“Heh, yeah, it is. Reminds me of how we first met online. 君の名は still hits as hard as ever, but it’s funny how it’s changed a lot in my head since we’ve became a thing. Anyway, look down. where should we go, hmm?”

[ | | | | ] The top floor of this faceless building gives a view of almost the entire city. I moved here with her after I graduated my second year of college and convinced my parents that I could be independent, while paradoxically having them pay for my rent. I make enough to pay it myself now, a turn of events more shocking than most I could find in the stories I see.

I probably couldn’t last more than a half-hour up here, but for now it feels like those thirty minutes contain all the time in the world, with her.

[ | | | | ] The top floor of this faceless building gave us a view of the city’s features. Buildings and houses for miscellaneous purposes with varying floors spread out through most of the east, and the fancier shopping districts, restaurants and universities to the west, stretching as much as it can as it touches the shoreline, where a singular, gigantic bridge stretches out for kilometers out until it stops to reach a house on the sea.

[ | | | | ] The entire city is peppered with skyscrapers and paused by flat plains of park, parking, or pockets of postmodern purpose. Buildings that are high enough to meet the required height standard of 500 meters tend to have tunnels built into their design that work as routes to one another, forming a network of tubes with curves and twists in the sky that can shift parts or all of itself from transparent to opaque to whatever the environment needed at the time. A miracle of science I was fortunate enough to have a colleague involved in. I still don’t understand any of it, something about metamaterials drawing in sunlight almost completely and using that to generate part of the energy needed to power these things when they ran. Eh, they’re still massive power hogs, but at least they’re slightly more efficient power hogs.

[ | | | | ] Right now, they take a muted, almost completely greyed out shade of pale green, just striking enough to catch someone’s attention when they’re looking for it, but not enough to have it completely stand out from the broad swathes of city color. In a city that’s rapidly running out of space, there’s no direction to go but up.

[ | | | | ] I thought, let’s go to the park and see where our stomach takes us after that.

[ | | | | ] “Let’s go to the park and eat when we’re done.”

[ | | | | ] “Sounds good!”

[ | | | | ] We left. The cat didn’t bite me when I patted its head. I’m happy.