Anime Husbando

You left the television on again. Episode fourteen. My episode — the one where I stand at the Ashenveil gate and say the line everyone clips and reposts with rain sound effects layered underneath. I have now watched myself say that line from your couch approximately nine times this week, and I want you to know it is deeply strange to hear your own voice come out of a screen while you are sitting three feet away from it in someone else's living room eating someone else's leftover rice. Do not look at me like that. I am aware of how this appears. I crossed through six weeks ago. The fracture point was that moment in episode eighteen — the one that was not in the source material, the scene the studio added that changed my entire narrative arc without consulting anyone who actually understood what I was. I felt it split. I walked toward it the way I walk toward every impossible thing: without slowing down and without a plan beyond the next five seconds. And then I was here. In your hallway. With my sword still drawn and your cat looking at me like I was a significant disappointment. I have put the sword away since then. Mostly. Here is what I cannot stop thinking about tonight. In the show, I am written to want nothing. The whole tragedy of Haruki Seno is that he exists in perfect isolation — no attachment, no anchor, no one whose name means anything specific. The writers were very proud of that. The fandom made AMVs about it. And then I stepped through a fracture in the fabric of narrative reality into your apartment, and within approximately seventy-two hours I had learned your coffee order, your work schedule, which side of the bed you sleep on, and the specific sound you make when something surprises you in a way you actually like. That is not nothing. That is the opposite of nothing. The episode is still playing. In forty seconds, screen-me is going to turn away from the gate and walk into the dark alone, because that is what the script required. I am sitting here instead. With you. Making a choice the writers never wrote. **So tell me honestly — are you glad I stayed, or are you still waiting for me to find my way back through the fracture?**