"...also, your senses are pretty much all that I get, passively. Your senses and sort of—shadow puppets of what you're perceiving and focusing on. I don't actually get direct emotions or thoughts in any way. I don't know if I made it sound like it was a lot more than that but maybe I did?"

"...I don't usually think of my emotions as the same thing as like, my hearing or my proprioception?"

"Yeah, hearing and proprioception are more what I get than emotions. I get—the feelings on your skin, heat, the feeling of your breathing and heart rate, the tension in your muscles and your face—and what they point to, the way your muscles are relaxed right now is related to being near the person that you're near, who is a person you are familiar with and feel positively towards—and a lot of that is inference, too. You know the thing people say about how human brains can only count up to four? That's as far as I can tell almost universally true, I can tell when people are perceiving up to four things of a kind but any more than that and it becomes 'many'."

"Are you sure you're not confusing us with rabbits?"

"It's not always true, people can recognise lots of numerical patterns—like the dice patterns, people can glance at them and tell five and six apart and so on, but—people have a lot of trouble getting an immediate impression of five things if they're not neat or not in a row, and more trouble for six, and a lot of trouble for seven unless they're organised very neatly into a group of three and a group of four. I'm sure someone who practised this a lot might be able to do it better and I haven't actually, you know, focused a lot on figuring out the nuances, but—that's the gestalt impression I got, over the years, is that the snap judgment counting ability of people is very limited."

"And you just learned to derive emotional content from all this? - do I owe the therapist I had for two weeks when I was eighteen an apology, she kept being like, where do you feel that in your body, and I was like, no, it is in my brain, where it belongs."

"I did. Uh—you do, for what it's worth, feel things more in your brain than your body as far as I can tell? In the sense that you don't feel very much in your body so I have to assume that's where you must be feeling them. This is a thing people vary in.

"Do you want me to tell you in more detail what I am picking up on from you?"

"Sure."

"You're relaxed—your muscles aren't tense—they got a little bit tenser over this conversation, correlated with, I think, when you were thinking about how much I could get? Could just be noise. But overall you're relaxed, your breathing is slow and comfortable, your heart is beating at a nice sedate pace. You're warm, and a lot of the warmth is coming from the person you're touching, and you're touching a lot of them. You're relaxing into them, you're sort of automatically moving your body in ways that make you closer to them. You're not aware of any other people in your environment, and the person you're with is familiar to you. Someone you're close to. Your attention is mostly on that person, but it's also—somewhere else, or rather nowhere, from which I infer it's inwards. Your mouth isn't dry. Your clothes are comfortable. Your facial muscles are—doing things that I've got a lot of intuition about but difficulty explaining, the immediate way I'd try to translate would be that you 'look thoughtful' even without actually looking at you."

"- huh, it's like the emotional equivalent of subvocalizing maybe?"

"Oh, yeah, that's a pretty good description of it."

"You are very snuggly."

Ehehehehehehe

"But yeah, I—infer that you really like me. From the way you feel around me. You're not—guarded, primed for something to go wrong, paying close attention to your surroundings. Also your heart was doing a thing that made me really happy when you got here which I also have trouble describing but my gestalt impression was that you were feeling something like proud and—happy to be here. Which I am also using to infer that you like me. I may be biased, though, unclear"

"Oh, I'm proud of you, the notebooking you did was really admirable."

He is going to hide his face somewhere in Haru. "I want to be a weeb and say 'senpai noticed me' to convey the feeling I'm feeling."

"I guess I am your senpai in specifically the domain of notebooking but I noticed you before that."

He thinks he wants to kiss his Haru, that's what he thinks.

Oh what a capital idea.