We have so many useless conventions of speech in English. It just struck me the other day. Like in the office, when someone greets you with “how’s it going?”, they don’t really want to know. It’s just more civilized than a grunt, less paranoid than “I see you, I’ll fight back if you try to kill me.” Or when you’re paying for groceries with a credit card and the clerk hands you the merchant copy of the receipt and says, “If you could sign.” And that’s it. It’s an IF/THEN statement, but there’s no “then,” like “then I’d be really happy” or “…then that would fulfill my purpose in this store.” Does she even think about what she’s saying?

But it’s true, we just make noises at each other, in the guise of other words that have been bled of their meaning. Handing linguistic carcasses back and forth in the name of polite society. Isn’t that strange? Does anyone else ever think about these things?

Take, for example, the text message I received from my giantess two weeks ago, where she announces she has to be gone for another month. That was a surprise: hearing her personal smartphone go off on the end table in the living room (she brought the nicer one that her office supplied her). I scrambled up the loveseat to find that the phone, left plugged in, was now fully charged. She said she called to have power restored since she wouldn’t be home and hoped I was okay. She told me that she couldn’t come home but didn’t express why she couldn’t come home. And I asked, believe me.

Right before she signed off she tacked on a “I hope you understand,” which isn’t a question and doesn’t invite a response. What if I didn’t understand? Would she fly home and return to me? Of course not, so why bother with this feint at politeness? We both know what it means.

Pardon me. I’ve grown bitter over the past six weeks. All in all I’m doing well, even a little surprised at myself for how well I’ve adjusted and survived in this place.

I’m sitting on a coaster on a glass-topped end table by a loveseat, in our living room. I’m writing this out with a thin graphite rod, ordinarily used to refill a mechanical pencil. Not that she left the refills out for me: I spent all of the last Sunday in October laboriously disassembling my giantess’s favorite crossword pencil. She won’t mind, I hardly use any of it, and my handwriting on this Post-It note is too small for her to scry without significant optical augmentation. These are really good leads, I like them.

Life here is lonely, even with a staggeringly enormous playground for me to explore. That is, I know the whole layout, but there’s also adventure lurking around every corner and new opportunities with my portal to the world (i.e., smartphone), now that I have electricity. When I got sick to death of learning elementary German and French and couldn’t take another iTunes University seminar on ethics, I looked up some YouTube videos on Parkour. I’ve been practicing on the carpet so I don’t break any “spindly little limbs,” as she called them. What I lack in velocity I make up for in lacking mass, so I can still throw myself around in some gravity-defying displays, I think. I can tiger-palm my way up the sectional now, which takes a fraction of the time it would to climb it. She’ll probably think it looks adorable when I get to show her…

Ugh, I hate thinking like that. I’m doing this for me, for my survival, not for my owner’s passing amusement.

…I hate thinking like that. I love her, I don’t hate her. This is just an inconvenience.

The food’s holding out. That was the second thing that flashed through my mind when she said she wasn’t coming home on schedule. But it’s a really good fridge and I’ve followed the order of when food’s likely to decay. The lettuce and celery are no good, so I’ve reverted to the sheets of nori on the counter; the chicken has gone off, so I opened the dried Genoa salami and the jerky, which is actually a nice little treat. I’m sure I don’t need the sodium, but maybe someone should’ve thought of that before abandoning a helpless dependent in a ludicrously over-sized environment.

I hate thinking like that, too. My giantess had a very good reason for taking off and not bringing me with her, and she must’ve had a good reason to extend her hiatus. I have to trust in that. If she really didn’t care about me, she could’ve just dropped me off with the neighbor’s dog.

My waste goes down the kitchen sink drain now. When it starts to smell, I run by the motion sensor and flush it away. Convenient. All the strings running up to all the counters have remained intact and I have full mobility everywhere. Thanks to three weeks of Parkour, I’ve extended my leaping ability considerably and can almost work my way fully around the kitchen without touching the ground. A little more self-reliant all the time.

I can sleep anywhere I like. I’ve long-ago lost that hysterical melodrama around our bedroom, and not only can I set foot in there, I can even climb up and sleep on her pillow. She very thoughtfully left me a pair of her panties, worn once, beside a nice photo of herself. An “action shot,” if you will, a forced-perspective shot she took on her phone and printed out in color for me. Like I don’t get that perspective enough: if she would’ve held the phone overhead and smiled up at it, that would’ve been a refreshing twist. …But I’m grateful. It’s easy to be cranky and resentful, but I have to step back and look at all she’s done for me. Oh, we’re going to have a long talk when she gets back, let that be clear, but I hope I’m not just a bundle of expectations.

And she has no right to be mad about what I’ve done to her underwear. No right.

Yeah, she texted me a week ago on Thanksgiving, simultaneously apologizing for not being with me for the holiday and announcing she’d be gone through December. Allowing myself to freak out a little, I pulled myself together and talked logistics with her. Let the record show it was her idea, not mine, that she have one of her friends stop by and check on me, at least drop off some groceries. I said I’d think about it.

It’s down to her artistic friend or the mature, smarter one with the annoying little dogs. If they spotted me up on the counter, they’d never stop yapping their heads off. My giantess figured her friend could probably drop them off with the neighbors for about $20, a kind of doggy play-date. And then, what, she or the artist would just hang out with me for the afternoon. Goddamn it, it’d be nice to see another living person.

I mean, I do chat with people. I found a size-fetish chat group, and I can Skype with them on my smartphone entertainment/education center. If I sit close enough to the camera to look like a regular-sized person, the camera won’t focus, but even when I sit back and people see how small I am, they think I’m faking it somehow. So that’s fine, but the conversations are very limited and they’re entirely online anyway. I’m not about to invite any of them over to my home, so… maybe one of her friends is the way to go. The drunk’s out, the embittered misandrist’s out…

Even if she just sat and watched TV the whole time, just to feel someone else here in this apartment, to hear the floors and walls echo with movement, that’d be something. Now, if I hear a noise, it’s either the house settling or something happening outside, and that’s not relaxing at all. Hearing a giantess thumping around in another room, that would be comforting.

I wonder if she’d stay the night. I don’t have to sleep in the bedroom, I can camp out in the living room, but… just knowing someone was here all night long, someone who could start up coffee in the morning… Would she even want to talk to me? I’ve seen her friends from a distance, hidden in a pocket or peeking over her shoulder at her phone. They seem nice. They know I’m her boyfriend, or that she has a boyfriend, but I don’t think she’s explained to them that I’m only as tall as their ankles and as frail as… well, just really frail.

Well, hell. If my giantess is going to be gone until the New Year, maybe I’ll take her up on that. Maybe each of them could come over, two whole visits for the month of December. That’s two more than last month.

I’d love to challenge the universe with an ironic declaration, “What could possibly go wrong?”, but I just don’t have the energy right now.