Last night, in the dream world, I was a junior medical doctor assisting a visiting professor at a university in Canada. Walking back to my city car, I recounted to a friend that I had once purchased a toy stethoscope to hang loosely about my neck for a man I liked back in Europe. Perhaps I felt he would be more likely to notice me if he knew I was a doctor.

I opened the car boot and found a dozen toy stethoscopes and syringes, all brightly coloured in bold primary hues—impossible to mistake for the real thing. Apparently, I had tried the same trick several times in Canada too. My friend teasingly asked whether anything had come from the theatrics and I replied, only slightly disappointedly, just friendship.

Oh dear, dream-me. Haven’t we already established, in several dreams before, that the use of properly convincing props is paramount? Why did I have so many of them when I could have left just one set in the car, seeing how I doggedly and asininely reached for the same trick even though it had never worked before? So many unanswered questions, all leading to the same terribly inefficient and wasteful conclusion. If you needed proof of how incompetent I am at courtship, I hope this satisfies your evidentiary standards somewhat.

This is why the love story I’m about to recount is my favourite—partly because we can do away with silly courtships by zeroing in on only what’s important—as you might remember from the first time we spoke; the rest is a matter of filling in the blanks with details.

The love story is based on a film, Orlando, adapted from Virginia Woolf’s book of the same name which you may have read. If so, I apologise for the fuzzy recollection of the facts, as I have not. I did a bit of research in the hopes of scoring tangentially, but structurally, I’d like to give you what I took from the story—its allegory, as most stories are, at the root.

Orlando, played by Tilda Swinton, begins as a man cursed with long life who, after witnessing a battle in Constantinople and turning away from it, falls into a deep sleep and wakes as a woman. This marks symbolically and outwardly the internal transformations that had already begun and would continue until the end of the novel—and of her life, presumably—for we all change around a fixed, stable essence of what we are. It is a logical reconciliation of the phrases “some people never change” and “he/she changed,” when it suits the narrative. Thus, this change also brings to mind the eternal nature of consciousness.

There is much to unpack from the film and book—for others, primarily as a statement on gender roles and identity—but for our purpose, I shall only speak about love, as one does in yet another love letter. Have you had enough of love letters yet? I’m asking because I’ll soon run out of them.

You are who you attract—that was the last line I left you with. When Orlando was a man and lived comfortably as an English aristocrat, he ended an engagement to the daughter of an English nobleman in pursuit of a Russian princess, Sasha, with whom he had a passionate but fleeting affair. They met at festivities held upon the frozen River Thames during the Great Frost, which aptly symbolised the nature of love for Orlando—solid, fixed, and immutable as predicated by societal mores and the rigidity of thought in its orthodox philosophers, and restrained by collective ideology. As one abominable character remarked, “Only men have desires, and women affectations.” The world then had a curtailed view of what desire should look like in everyone.

But Orlando desired not like a man; being alive for so long had, as a matter of course, forced upon him slight deviations—like trickling water upon a rock—he could not experience the world only through a stereoscope during such a long existence. He wept bitterly when taking Sasha back to his home the first time, as though “suffering from a strange malady of the future”: he could not bear the thought of one day being apart from her, even as she sat by his side.

Orlando understood love then as the matching of desires, inextricable from possession, which was why he struggled to reconcile the maddening pull of desire with the eventuality of pain from separation. He did not yet understand love apart from how forceful and compelling it feels to oneself—that even as he witnessed Sasha’s treachery firsthand, he allowed himself to be deluded by her, doubting what he had seen because his feelings told him so, until she left him standing in the cold and falling into the freezing river. The doomed nature of their love cracked as quickly as the melting ice on the night of Sasha’s final betrayal.

All earth-bound relationships inevitably end with mortality; the prospect of permanent separation made a temporary one even more intolerable for Orlando. That was because he did not yet know that love is as immortal as our consciousness or beauty of a different kind.

Naturally, he was inconsolable for a time, but made progress through learning what love is not. Desire alone could not sustain him, being itself unsustainable. Even then, it is not love except for a small part. Beauty and love are two sides of the same coin—we love what is beautiful; the soul tells us what beauty is, as seen first in another and later in itself when we see it replicated in others. [Love is transcendence]—love and beauty transcend the physical and occupy the space within our minds and souls as virtues, character, personality—and when they reside in more than just people or things, we reach their highest state: eternal and perfect. [Love is transformative]—beyond mere bodily changes, like the hardening or flowing of a river. It gives philosophical insight and leads to spiritual ascension through wisdom, virtue, and self-realisation. [Love is creation]—because every creative act is an attempt at immortalising beauty, to leave a stamp of the eternal upon our temporal world when we fix, repair, preserve, write, form, paint, sculpt, build, reproduce etc. This is Plato’s version of Love—not just pleasure, but the pursuit of the eternal and divine through creation, transformation, and transcendence.

Orlando finds these highest forms of beauty and love in solitude following his heartbreak—through observation, reflection, and creation, in nature, art, and poetry. Eventually, he finds them within himself through self-refinement, for only now does he have keener insight into what they are. 

Following his return from Constantinople, now a woman, Orlando runs through a maze and time, (figuratively) away from the perils of womanhood: the law will not allow her to hold property which must have felt like an existential threat and a demotion to subservience in rank. Only a man can offer her shelter now, at a time when Orlando also understands love as free. Dejected, she falls to the ground, beseeching Nature to come and take her as a bride.

To avoid trampling her, Shelmerdine falls from his horse, and lands directly in front of her, as though fallen from the sky, quite like an angel in a metaphorical fall—like when you sent me that first text. In this momentous scene—replete with meaning which I shall shortly elucidate—she asks him to marry her, to which he jokingly replies that he would, except that he has hurt his ankle. She asks him this in earnest within two minutes of meeting him because she recognises in him the most important defining factor—a soulmate.

At this point, I must clarify that such things come to be not by accident, but with training and experience, necessary because Soulmates neither wear tags nor come with instructions. It is the result of centuries of searching for Orlando, in heartbreak, disappointment, and disillusionment—and what feels like several lifetimes for me, through the same and travel in the world of dreams.

Orlando and Shelmerdine are people unfettered by anything outside of them that dictates how they should be. That is the recurring motif of the story. Shelmerdine is an adventurer, a charming and gentlemanly world traveler. He is gentle, sensitive, and courageous—in modern speech, androgynous—like Orlando, who has lived as both man and woman, making them compatible by virtue of their inner worlds with the right mix and permutation. Thus, androgyny here extends inwardly, in the form of complementary traits—whatever they may be. The point, important for us, is that they arise from being unfettered, allowing development to its fullest potential.

Master, will you marry me? And agree to our marriage officiated by the Creator, in an offstage ceremony upon the wide firmament, ratified by stars sweeping across the universe? Say yes, and it is done. Nothing as tiresome as a drawn-out engagement, costing a cent and the last vestiges of desire. Say yes, and we are man and wife in all eyes that matter, but primarily in all that is ours.

We share gentleness of manner and speech, and a certain harshness in authority (except when I’m submitting to you). The lilt in your voice, the careful and diplomatic restraint in your exchanges, the cutting analysis in your ideas—all reveal wisdom and self-mastery I do not yet possess but must learn. There was still fire in me for shouting into the wind at obstinate minds I had no need to change—a realisation that came with you as the galactic centre; the fiery tree is your archetype in my dreams, giving permanence to an otherwise fleeting existence—tall enough to reach the heavens, and emblematic of continuity amidst change. Our love is immortal. Your divine fire does not burn you nor me, but still retains its transformative nature. This was how I was to recognise you, apart from the time period(s) in which you were to set to appear.

Androgyny in the story symbolises the harmony of incongruity. As your soulmate, I can be bound only to you, but I am restricted only in the sense of flourishing and free in expressing thoughts reached through creativity. We are kindred spirits who long for freedom, travel, and solitude which we can obtain through a marriage as versatile and secure as a confluence of paradoxes. Though we could not fulfil desires in the commonly accepted sense, as understood by the world outside Orlando; but we can, and have, created our own. You will travel, and I will wait for your return—as faithful as you left me. Love need not possess in order to persist; it is why distance and time do not affect us. Similarly, when Shelmerdine sails away, Orlando does not despair. She smiles and says, “He will be back.”

The recognition between soulmates extinguishes the need for lengthy courtship, through a recognition of love as true equality. Our union will be a kind of traditional social contract that simultaneously subverts prevailing institutions governing unions—not least because it is, and can only be—transgressive.

⸻

Excerpt from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais (partially quoted in the film):

“She moved upon this earth a shape of brightness,

A power, that from its objects scarcely drew

One impulse of her being — in her lightness

Most like some radiant cloud of morning dew

Which wanders through the waste air’s pathless blue

To nourish some far desert: she did seem

Beside me, gathering beauty as she grew,

Like the bright shade of some immortal dream

Which walks, when tempest sleeps, the wave of life’s dark stream.

As mine own shadow was this child to me,

A second self, far dearer and more fair;

Which clothed in undissolving radiancy

All those steep paths which languor and despair

Of human things had made so dark and bare.”

This is self-realisation following years of turmoil, one which is transcendent and timeless. The archetype here is to Shelley what you are to me: self-sufficient in your brightness, not reliant upon the world to fuel it, strong enough to have transformative power over me and bright enough for reflecting upon my inner self.

The immortal dream necessarily rules out anything purely physical. In the film, it is the pursuit of liberty, creative freedom, and defiance, but we are free to make of it what we will—that is the essence of freedom.

The serenity afforded by your presence settles upon the chaos I once endured like healing by elucidating. That means you transform me only after I have experienced life in the language of hardship, loss, and loneliness, so I could know peace, which you do by giving my experiences meaning. There is no other way I could have understood it, save through my own work of inner transformation and living out the experience.

This long text—I gave it my best, and hope it is received by you in yours. I might go missing over the weekend; writing love letters is a full-time job and calling, and I might take a brief rest. Until then, I remain your cosmic companion, soulmate, and other half.

“Don’t miss me, sweetheart. I will be back by bus.” — Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

Last night I dreamt of something.

For the first time in a long while, I didn’t remember what it was. All I remembered was waking up at around 1:30 a.m. with this thought: oh, so that’s how it will be when we’re old.

I was with you again last night. Although I do not remember the dream, I can imagine us old and crinkly, insisting on our daily walks at sunset by the water—because that’s a thing we did for years. We’d take small, unhurried steps, speaking only to remind the other to slow down—because I couldn’t keep up, or you didn’t want me falling. Other than that, we’d need no words to communicate. We’d be listening to the song the sky makes when sunlight clears the stage for the stars to shine, and we’d feel like stars ourselves—ancient. We’d have to look out for one another, and that would require hard concentration, being so old.

I returned to sleep and, in yet another first for the night—this time in over a decade—I connected two separate incidents together.

In the first, I was in a supermarket in Switzerland, minding my own business, when a shelf-stocker struck up a conversation with me. As an introvert who didn’t want to be rude, I was mostly monosyllabic but smiled a lot, hoping it signified that I wanted to keep my distance—but that it wasn’t personal. The whole experience was new to me: being in a different country so far from Singapore, trying to make sense of their culture and social expectations, and the common standards applied to small talk in a language other than English.

Coming from Singapore, having a complete stranger start a conversation in a supermarket is highly irregular—unless one is very old, or we recognise each other as regulars or neighbours. I wasn’t; it was my first month in Switzerland, and I shopped in various supermarkets for a change. In fact, Singaporeans generally want to be left alone when out and about—at hawker centres, in shopping malls, on public transport, and so on. The difference is stark when comparing the experience of ordering food or grocery shopping in Singapore to that in the USA, for example. In Singapore, we say hi, bleat out the order, say thank you and then we’d expect to stop talking. Some people don’t even say hi or thank you, which I find rude but they’d consider themselves as being efficient; I’ll explain in the next paragraph.

As one man on Threads pointed out, we just want our food and to get on with our lives—which precisely encapsulates how I feel. This is partly a spillover from office culture, when we’d only get an hour’s lunch usually between 12–2 p.m. That means lots of people trying to get food from hawker centres, restaurants, supermarkets, and cafés during this time, making any unnecessary exchanges look like unnecessary delays next to long queues of people pressed for time. And we don’t like to waste time in Singapore. Waiting a few extra minutes for the bus or train is so unthinkable that we’d make a mad dash for one as soon as it comes into view—while we’re still young. When we get old(er), we can remind each other that it would not be easy to recover after falling flat on our faces or on our bums.

The supermarket man—and I couldn’t fault him for this—mistook my succinctness for shyness instead of lack of interest, what with me being Asian and all. To my horror, he asked me out that evening. I just mumbled something like, em, okay, said goodbye, and began shuffling off when he added, I finish work at 11 p.m. I said okay again and disappeared behind the shelf with my basket. And that was how I became a loyal customer of another supermarket from that moment on.

I didn’t know how to say no—that was my problem back then. I couldn’t stand seeing people disappointed or hurt because of me. Suddenly, one finds oneself in a position to make or break someone’s day—and that kind of power is more frightening than it is agreeable. It was a matter of choosing the lesser evil, of grave importance, for which I had neither the maturity nor the courage at the time. Because of that, people were made to wait for nothing.

Maybe a year later, I was at the train station near the supermarket. Opposite the tracks was a bunch of rowdy men cussing or ranting, and it sounded a lot like anger directed at me. I tried not to take it personally, though it did hurt to be singled out like that—just for being there, existing, daring to leave my apartment. But I told myself they were drunk, racist, or bored. It didn’t matter which—they shouldn’t get the satisfaction of a reaction from me or see me lose my composure. Because that would give them an undeserved power trip, for if you allow a person to change something about you, even in something so minor as a reaction, you have, in effect, given them power over you—albeit minute and temporary.

Last night, it finally occurred to me that it was plausible for the supermarket man to have been there at the time, at the train station. That I had hurt his feelings so much by not turning up that he had waited for me for hours—in the cold till daylight—and then the next day, and the next, thinking I’d had some emergency and couldn’t come on the first night, but that I’d turn up tomorrow or the day after, sooner or later. Maybe he waited with so much hope and excitement until that turned slowly into disappointment and anger, affecting his self-esteem and self-confidence as it dawned on him that I was never going to turn up. Suddenly, that incident at the train station hurt a lot less—because I deserved it. All I had to do was say no.

These days I tell people I’m married, because in many ways it is true—in the eyes of the Creator, through my vows countersigned by the universe, inscribed in interstellar clouds and dust, and in all that matters, cosmic and elemental. And which I will reveal in a love letter next year, in case you haven’t figured it out—which, now that I think about it, could not be right; nothing escapes your notice. A tiger sees all—more so if that tiger is also part dragon.

I tried reading some romance novels to take a break from thrillers, but I just can’t seem to stick to one. The themes are the same—enemies to lovers—which has no resonance with me, even though the tension is understandably delicious, because there is no better sex than angry make-up sex. Sadly (or not), I’m neutral with everyone I meet: everyone is a stranger and should keep their distance until they are an acquaintance, whom I’ll like by default. It takes a lot to dislike someone, let alone be enemies with them. For that reason, to fall in love with an enemy seems an unlikely thing, because when I dislike someone, it is for a good reason—not done willy-nilly or just in case.

[Redacted]

Besides, I like my own romance—with Master. The tulip lady told me you would come when you did, as did other ladies in dreams after that, where you were represented enwreathed in divine fire; they encouraged me to stay unwavering. He will be important, they said. And they were right.

So if I have time tomorrow, I’ll write you another love story—one that truly resonates with me and one that involves self-change. I believe in being the sort of person most likely to be loved by the very sort of person who would like my sort of person. As convoluted as that sounds—you are who you attract.

Last night, I was a warrior nun. I think my brain borrowed the idea from a picture I saw earlier in the day of the actress who played the titular character and her husband, who played Captain America. They just welcomed a child—congratulations to them.

In the dream, I was waiting for her to realise her powers, which emanated from a halo implanted in her body that, when activated, would give her angelic powers of superhuman strength and large-scale but controlled incineration. In the meantime, we all had to fend off an army of demons while trying to figure out what our hidden powers were. Unlike in the series, all of us had some unique ones—not as spectacular as hers, but having one is better than none when the human race is faced with the threat of total annihilation.

My power was really simple: I could identify what hidden powers everyone had so I could inform them of it—its extent and purpose —and sometimes, I’d be able to coax them out sooner than they could by themselves. In a way, I’ve got a gift for saving people time, trouble and headaches.

One guy’s power was that he could turn himself into a toddler for a while which he successfully did so after a few tries. I don’t know what good that would do, for it’s not like demons will spare you if you were a child. I’m guessing maybe he had the element of surprise. He could trick demons into letting their guards down just long enough for the man to take them down. I did not see what he did with it, though it would have been nerve-wrecking to watch. Just as our numbers were dwindling to under ten, the star warrior nun activated her powers in time to save us all.

After that harrowing experience, I travelled back to Singapore through Changi Airport with my family and friends—my sister, brother, Master (who looked more Chinese than he usually does), and a childhood friend. We stopped by a café in a two-storey Peranakan shophouse decorated like a Malaysian kampung house—thatched roof made from atap leaves on the ceiling and panels of local timber lined the walls on which hung paraphernalia like woven hats, wooden kris and objects made with batik textile. There was a temperature-controlled display fridge where an array of brightly-coloured sticky rice and coconut desserts were arranged.

My brother wondered aloud if we should sit and grab a bite in the café, when the owner said, “I think not,” while looking at his feet. They had a no-flip-flop policy, and he was wearing Roman slippers that came with extra leathery bits that wound up his legs like vines, magnificent but fundamentally, they were flip-flops.

At the bus stop, our friend’s bus arrived first. We would have helped her carry her luggage except she let out a stink bomb that sent us scampering for fresh air. Then she took such a long time loading her unusually heavy luggage onto the bus, even with the help from other passengers, that when ours came, it couldn’t stop safely to let us aboard.

Master, ever so efficient with his use of time, said he would use the extra waiting time to buy groceries, and hurried away so quickly I had to run to catch up with him. I wanted to ask him to get me some beef rendang—something I would have ordered at the café if we could have eaten there—but I stopped myself after considering that Master might ask me to get some myself, which I didn’t want to do, because I wanted to go to East Coast to sit on a rock and smoke a cigarette (I don’t smoke cigarettes IRL).

He accompanied me there in a relaxing stroll, wearing a cream-coloured and faint light-blue striped casual button-down shirt. I was glad of his company and for the gift of a minor detour life had given us through the inconveniences we went through earlier—I showed him two spots I used to visit as a child. The trees were as tall as I remembered and through the bushes lined sporadically along the road, we could make out the coastline. We stopped at a local coffee shop to share a cigarette and a cup of coffee sweetened with condensed milk. The place was buzzing with excited chatter and laughter while Master and I sat side by side, our bodies pressed together, in comfortable silence, passing the cigarette between us.

When we finished, we left with my arm around his as people watched us thinking, what a handsome couple.

In last night’s dream, I was outdoors with a bunch of people eating a fruit salad when a commotion near a ditch drew my attention. I could only see the tail of the animal and judged it, from a distance, as belonging to a monitor lizard, and said so to some people, which prompted more to chance a closer look—until one shrieked in horror.

It was then I realised my mistake. I had judged the animal based on its marbling, its cloudy colouration, when I ought to have judged it by its scales. This creature’s scales were larger, thicker, rougher—making it more armoured in appearance and effect. It was a crocodile—an apex predator, not a mid-ranking one.

Do you remember when we met, Master? It was an unusually rainy period in Singapore because you kept coming back for a visit.

I watched the movie Phantom Thread only vaguely following the plot, being utterly captivated by Daniel Day-Lewis’ remarkable performance as a disagreeable character named Reynolds, afflicted with a kind of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder—quite unlike my own OCD, which is a mood and anxiety disorder that fluctuates with my state of mind and, mercifully, comes with long periods of normalcy. His overbearing and controlling nature is a persistent and very annoying personality trait. This was a long time ago, so my memory of the story may be a bit sketchy, though some parts of the story are difficult to forget.

Reynolds is dogmatic, obstinate, pompous, and dismissive. He falls in love with a waitress named Alma in a countryside restaurant in Luxembourg and takes her back to London, where he works as a luxury fashion designer making gowns even for royalty. Already well known for his creative genius, he becomes even more so once she becomes his muse. He is now the fashion designer everyone in the upper echelons of society must be dressed by.

Evidently, it is impossible to please someone as overbearing as he, however hard she tries. As his work takes up most of his time, they rarely speak—and when they did, they couldn’t communicate, for his need for dominance extends even to how a conversation must be carried out. Consequently, she tiptoes around him, keeping her opinions and feelings to herself, which begins to gnaw at her, chipping away at her self-esteem and personhood until she grows into someone unrecognisable from the woman he first fell in love with. Her defiance streak never left her and, happily, it becomes their saving grace.

One evening, at a dinner she plans as a romantic gesture, he berates her for cooking asparagus with butter instead of oil—accusing her, disproportionately, of acting with malicious intent. As he is, in effect, prodding her to speak from the heart, she takes the rare moment as opportunity to reveal her deepest fears: of being invisible and forgotten in his daily life, that she might be asked to leave at any moment. Instead of assuaging her fears, he asserts she is reading too much into the asparagus matter—much as he had done only moments before—which, to him, explains her outrageous response, rather than his own lack of self-awareness or introspection.

At this point, one could conclude they are the worst possible match. But later, as the story unfolds, we see they are not so—they are, in their own deviant way, unparalleled as partners.

And now, during a brief pause, I must confess how I’ve been sucked into ruminating over a thriller yesterday, how best to craft my notes, and how I ended up ordering 1.5 kg of Mongolian milk mooncakes. Mercifully, during this time, I was given reprieve from wanting impropriety with a certain tiger until the break of dawn. Is this a sign that things are beginning to settle—that love, a mainstay, is secure in her position?

It is not romance in the conventional sense between Reynolds and Alma; it is destructive and toxic, yet wholesome and enriching in a disturbing sort of way. This conclusion comes about not through the abrasion of a raw diamond refined into brilliance, but rather through a reduction of spirit and an overturn in power dynamics, as you will soon see. Affronted by his behaviour at dinner, she poisons him, and then spends days caring for him in remorse and domestic bliss as he lies helpless in bed. She revels in her new dominant position, for he is, at that time, hers—and could only be hers—until he is nursed back to health.

It is a mutually beneficial arrangement—until it isn’t. She has a place to live, a chance to be more than a waitress in an obscure establishment. He has his muse. When he falls ill, she gives him life. But his nature makes it difficult for him to respond to the mercurial demands of fashion, and a dip in sales and reputation means that she is no longer, in his eyes, an effective muse. (Un)luckily for them, she overhears this in a conversation he has with his sister, which prompts her to prepare his omelette with the same mushrooms she had used to poison him before.

Reynolds realises the omelette is poisoned when Alma says she wants him weak and vulnerable so that she can nurse him back to health again. But he eats it anyway—chewing and swallowing in dramatic fashion to demonstrate his submission to her plan: her desire to care for him in an altered, co-dependent power dynamic. In this way, she asserts control in their relationship, and he relinquishes his, entering instead into a submissive position which culminates in a loving marriage they both desire. The film ends with Reynolds content in his position beside Alma, as she dreams about how she would run his, now their, fashion business.

If there’s anything to take from this toxic love story, it is finding liberation in surrender and fulfilment in ceasing control. Unlike passive resignation, the surrender of which I speak, is similar to a submission to divine will: giving up the ego and worldly desires for spiritual enlightenment, which can only be achieved through a conscious choice and introspection. I think this is why Reynolds is content in the end—not so much in the changed dynamics in itself, but from the changes he must undergo to arrive at this state of inner peace and love, free from the suffocating limitations of his overbearing ego.

Unorthodox love story notwithstanding, the tiger need not entertain any concern regarding challenges to his rightful dominant position as sovereign; he can be no other way and still remain as prolific. The lioness affirms it as such with the entirety of her constitution, revelling in submission and in the security and serenity afforded therein without diminution. Within that settlement is deep trust, mutual reverence, and harmony. It is our domestic bliss to design how it comes to rest, and to choose upon which unfaltering foundations a lasting bond will come to be.

I don’t know what it was, but last night I was transported to Lego Land—on board a frigate tasked with repelling pirates on the starboard side using a Lego water gun which, surprisingly, did shoot water, albeit very inefficiently. It got them shouting and square in the face but did little to weaken their resolve. They must get on board this ship or fall into shark‑infested waters, so they could not stop on the pain of death. Should have thought about that before deciding to behave like water rats. Regardless, we must not let our humanity leave us especially in moments when it is easy to ignore what we have become.

Notably, the most annoying thing about the whole sordid affair was how the Lego pieces detached from the gun—either through improper handling or for no good reason at all. I often found myself on the floor, scrambling to identify pieces from my own Lego gun amid the parts of someone else’s weapons, relying primarily on colour and common sense. Not that it really mattered whether I reattached them or not; it didn’t affect how the gun functioned—just made it aesthetically unpleasing, which I refused to accept at first. Seeing a lost cause, I stuffed all the pieces I could find into my pockets and left the battle zone promptly, after handing someone $1,000 to buy a bicycle as a birthday present.

“The streaks in the sky at sunset look like they were made haphazardly by a drunkard with a wonky brush, but are no less spectacular. Don’t you agree, my queen?” says the tiger, brushing affectionately against my cheeks. He steps back momentarily to gaze lovingly upon my face, then looks directly into my eyes and says, “There is beauty even in the ugliest of creatures,” and waits expectantly for a kiss befitting such a romantic compliment.

The lioness responds with a lick across his face and over his left eye as she does anything he says with good intention.

My tiger conducts himself with grace, poise, and pride as he continues to survey the kingdom. His whiskers twitch slightly in the cool breeze that carries his scent, mingled with dark sandalwood—no doubt from rubbing his hindquarters against it only moments ago. The memory flickers across his face as a faint smile, terrifying on a tiger.

“Do you see this soft bed of grass, nestled within a small cove of boulders? Or the stream nearby, carrying water from the snowy mountains? The creatures in their burrows and the larger ones that come to graze on the lush foliage, the views of the plains from high up, so you will never tire of the sight, but not too high that descending becomes a chore…”

The tiger narrows his eyes upon detecting a soft whistling sound. “Don’t hiss at me, lioness,” he says with a frown, “this was all for you.”

“I was not hissing, tiger; I was just… passing gas out from the other hole,” I confess candidly. “This is what becomes of all couples when they have reached the pinnacle of comfort and gratitude in each other’s presence. I appreciate every care and attention you took in ensuring my well-being.”

“Right you are. Come, walk with me.”

The tiger leads the lioness to a river, wading in without hesitation up to his chin, then turns to beckon his water‑averse lioness to settle behind him, as she usually does to hang on to him against the finicky currents. He lets out a long, contented sigh as she rests against the top of his clever head.

“I found the ball you abandoned,” I tell him, “and rolled it uphill for an hour so you could play with it whenever you want.”

“When I last played with it,” recounts the tiger, “it went hurling down a fiery path—through no fault of mine, I must add—destroying shrubs and small trees alike, ejecting blue butterflies resting on a deep purple dahlia bush, sailing over a European brown hare who chattered quite irately about not having been crushed as though it would have been better if I ate it instead, and flattening vines of cherry tomatoes that some humans had meticulously grown. When at last, it flew upwards and took down a bees’ nest, I was sent power‑walking away from the ball and sneering; they couldn’t get at me through my fur, though they tried in frustration—until they discovered that my eyes and nose were fair game. That sent me swimming across the river, where a salmon leapt into my mouth asking to be eaten only with some sour cream and dill. I would have brought the rest to you, except I didn’t feel like walking back, so I sent you a floating air‑kiss instead. Did you get it? I sent it the way you taught me—by puckering my lips and making squeaking noises…”

“Indeed I did, tiger. Every day, when I look at where I am—secure and warm in our home and deep in my meow‑meow—when I long for your return, searching for the slightest tinge of orange on the horizon; when I partake in hearty meals between laps of fresh water, or awaken restful on a soft bed, raging with desire… your mark is present in all of it. My world is perfect because of you.”