Even though I always say Miss Y is spacey, the truth is, being with her has made me a lot spaceier too. The two of us constantly walk out the door without a single brain cell functioning between us. If someone bumps into us on the street, both of us will instantly blurt out “I’m sorry”—even if the person went out of their way to bump into us on purpose. Our mouths are always faster than our brains.
Usually, it takes us a good ten minutes of walking before we finally realize, Wait, that wasn’t our fault at all! By the time our brains kick back in and the spaciness fades, ten minutes have already passed. It’s so frustrating! We even have to do a full review of the incident once we get home, lecturing ourselves not to let anyone maliciously bump into us again. In reality, we’re both just total goofballs, equally silly and spacey. I guess all you can say is: we are truly cut from the same cloth.
I have always felt that writing is a very joyful thing. I love putting words together; it’s one of my few true passions, something I’ve stuck with ever since middle school. I can accept having no traffic or having no one like my work, but I absolutely cannot accept people attacking it. Every single one of my pieces is something I once poured my love and lifeblood into. Sometimes when I’m writing and people maliciously disparage my work, I want to cry so badly.
But if I cry, people just call me melodramatic. The truth is, I’m just a girl who loves writing so much. I love my stories, and no one loves them more than I do. In real life, Miss Y describes me as a girl who cries easily. And it’s true—in reality, I don’t know how to argue or get angry with people, and I don’t even know how to swear. I put 10,000% of my heart into my work, and I truly love every single character and story under my pen. So, if you don’t like it, please just leave. Don’t trash my work. You have absolutely no right to disparage it.
I was feeling incredibly frustrated while writing this afternoon, and my entire aura was in the gutter. When Miss Y came home, what she encountered was a gloomy “mushroom woman” lurking in the study, locked in a state of helpless rage. It was as if dark clouds, thunder, and lightning were hovering right over this little mushroom, ready to strike at any second. Miss Y was quite startled by my low-energy cloud, so she quickly put her clever little brain to work.
She ordered a six-inch matcha ice cream cake from a highly-rated bakery she knew I absolutely adored. While waiting for the cake to arrive, Miss Y tiptoed around the living room, changing her clothes and tidying up with absolute caution. She didn’t dare make a single peep, walking entirely on her tiptoes. Click.
That was the sound of me opening the study door. Seeing my face still tight with fury, she came right up and gave me a massive hug. I didn’t push her away, but I didn’t hug her back either. Miss Y just unilaterally held me close, and through her embrace, I slowly began to recharge my battery. Still, I kept a grumpy look on my face.
Knock, knock, knock. A knock sounded at the door—the cake Miss Y ordered had arrived. Miss Y let go of me to fetch the cake while I sat at the dining table, brooding over what to write next in my story. Being completely devoid of inspiration is a deeply irritating state of mind. Miss Y set the cake on the table, cut a huge slice for me, and scraped every single strawberry onto my plate. She watched me take bite after bite.
Gradually, the gloomy, fierce expression on my face melted away into a blank, NPC-like stare. Seeing me slowly return to my normal self, Miss Y let out a massive sigh of relief.
My brain finally returned to my body, and I woke up from my sleepwalking state. Even though I still hadn’t figured out how to write the next part of the story, my mood had improved a bit and the irritation had faded. My expression became much friendlier too. Thank heavens for sweets, thank heavens for cake, and thank heavens for Miss Y.
When it comes to earning money from writing web novels, sometimes I make a lot, and sometimes I make very little. It’s a career that relies entirely on the love and support of fans. Miss Y works at a company, so between her base salary and bonuses, she might make more or less depending on the month, but she has a steady baseline so it’s never too low. Compared to me, it’s a very stable job.
Once you leave school and enter society, the topics you talk about inevitably change, but please do not ask me how much I earn—it’s a very private matter. Last time a friend brought up the topic of income, they joked about whether I was living off my wife as a freeloading “soft-rice enterpriser.” In front of outsiders, I would obviously never admit to being someone who lives off my wife. But in my head, I was thinking: So what if I live off my wife? Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t! Besides, it’s not like I begged for it—my wife literally spoon-feeds it to me. When I went home and told Miss Y about it, she teased me, saying I sounded entirely too proud of being a freeloader.
My wife is an animation VFX artist, and I am a novelist. Just looking at our jobs makes our traits pretty obvious. That’s right—both my wife and I are absolute geeks for novels, manga, and anime.
Though it might not show on the outside, our inner chuunibyou tendencies completely unleash themselves the moment we are at home. Right in the middle of eating dinner, Miss Y will suddenly shout, “Tatakae!” (Fight!) I catch her drift instantly, echoing back, “Tatakae!” and then the two of us just calmly go back to eating. Miss Y is a voracious novel reader who will read absolutely any genre
I am the manga and anime fanatic; as long as a series catches my interest, I will binge the whole thing. The two of us will also randomly pick a couple of local anime conventions to attend. We do cosplay, and when we see characters we love, we enthusiastically go up to take photos with them. However, we never add anyone’s social media.
In real life, we are just corporate slaves with only one professional account. If we add too many people, it becomes hard to categorize them, and we are terrified that our colleagues might see our chuunibyou captions and question us about them at work. That would be a total nightmare.
A happy home makes a person silly and spacey, and a cute Miss Y leaves your health bar completely depleted.
So having a cute Miss Y in a happy home… I must have literally ascended to heaven, right? When I’m taking photos, Miss Y will walk left and right around me, and the moment I press the shutter for a selfie, she’ll pop over to plant a kiss on me. When I’m unhappy, she’ll lean in close and cling to me, refusing to let me sink into a vortex of bad moods.
When she eats the food I cook, she showers me with intense praise, declaring me the number one chef in the whole wide world. Sometimes, right in the middle of eating noodles, she’ll let out a sudden, weird shriek just to prove her happiness levels are bursting through the roof. Miss Y uses a secret alt account to quietly follow the novels I write.
She will curse out the people who disparage my work, and in the middle of the night, she’ll secretly take my phone to delete the nasty comments because she’s afraid I’ll be sad if I see them. Before sleeping, she holds me tightly, giving me a warm embrace and a cozy blanket so I can drift off in total comfort. She sings to soothe me to sleep, and she praises me as the absolute best novelist. Being with her makes me the happiest person alive.
Ever since I casually mentioned to Miss Y one day that I get incredibly hungry when I write until 2:00 PM, she started systematically feeding me. Every day around that exact time, she would order delivery for me—all kinds of little cakes, egg tarts, and afternoon tea.
Without exaggeration, Miss Y ordered from practically every single bakery in our district during that period. It wasn’t until I stepped on the scale later and realized I had gained quite a bit of weight that Miss Y stopped ordering little cakes and switched to ordering light, healthy meals. Gradually, the weight dropped back off.
Whenever I came across a particularly delicious light meal, I would save half of it and wait for Miss Y to come home in the evening so we could share it. Thank you to Miss Y for feeding me; I love her.
On the days when our menstrual cycles don’t align, I get to live like an absolute emperor. Every day, I sleep until I wake up naturally, entirely spared from the frustration of having to coax Miss Y out of bed for work, yet I still get to receive a sweet morning kiss from her.
I can sleep until noon and order whatever expensive takeout I usually can’t bring myself to buy. At exactly 2:00 PM, Miss Y’s afternoon tea delivery arrives right on time. When she comes home in the evening, I’m greeted with a bouquet of fresh flowers, a fun little knick-knack, and a sweet, post-work kiss.
I get to lounge in bed all day long, completely exempt from thinking about what to have for dinner—I either watch Miss Y cook, or she takes care of ordering takeout. In any case, no thinking or labor is required on my part. For those seven days, I am the reigning emperor. While waiting for the takeout, she will wrap her arms around me, rub my tummy, and praise me, telling me what a good, sweet baby I am.
After dinner, Miss Y applies a heating pad to my stomach and preps a hot water bottle for me. Even if I wake up in the middle of the night with cramps and disturb her sleep, she’ll just patiently rub my tummy, kiss me, and ask if I want to bite on something while I sleep. She coaxes me just like a mother soothing a little infant. Lulled by Miss Y’s fragrant and incredibly safe embrace, I quickly drift off to sleep.
My wife has an alt account, and I have one too. A while back, I tried using my alt to add her alt, hoping to become best friends with her undercover. As it turned out, she busted me the second I added her. Consequently, both of us stopped paying attention to our main accounts and started messing around wildly on our alts. Our editor gave us a vicious scolding for it, so we had to behave and start posting properly on our main accounts again. My wife now uses her main account to dutifully cheer me on, but at night, the two of us continue to play around on our alts. Honestly, I think having two accounts is amazing. One account is famous enough for everyone to know and love, while the other secret alt is known only to your partner, allowing you to run wild, flirt, and tease each other without worrying about causing any bad public reactions.
Even though we’ve been together for many years, Miss Y and I still have our share of arguments. Whenever we fight, Miss Y stops talking and starts giving me the silent treatment. When that happens, I deliberately rush over to pester her. Even if she tells me to get lost, I refuse to budge, stubbornly sticking to her like glue. I just purely lean against her and cling to her without saying a word—at times like this, the more you say, the more mistakes you make. While I’m clinging to her, if she cracks a smile, it means she’s been coaxed out of it.
And that is the cue for me to start acting angry so she has to turn around and coax me! That is the exact flow of our little couple arguments. Though, to be fair, getting her to coax me is a whole lot harder. Brace yourself, Miss Y!
After spending so much time with Miss Y, I wake up feeling just as spacey as she does, and my daily habits have gravitated toward hers as well. Except for my sense of style, which remains dead and buried. For instance, a while ago I bought another T-shirt with a cartoon pig pattern on it, only to be roasted by Miss Y for having the taste of a toddler. While I know that many of my behavioral quirks and speaking habits have become identical to Miss Y’s, my fashion sense remains a lifelong tragedy.
I worked very late tonight; my inspiration completely exploded, and I stayed up until 3:00 AM. I had to email my editor and share some writing insights on my account. By the time I actually got into bed, it was already 4:00 AM. Miss Y was sleeping soundly like a little pig.
I was feeling a bit uncomfortable, so out of pure mischief, I woke her up and told her I wasn’t feeling well. Now, Miss Y actually has terrible morning-after crabbiness, but the moment she heard me say I was hurting, she immediately grew worried about my health. Seeing how anxious she was for me, I suddenly felt like such a bad person. Miss Y looked at me with deep concern in her eyes and asked where it hurt.
I said, “My heart.” “How can your heart be hurting? Is it from a lack of sleep?” “I don’t know, I’ve only slept three hours over the last two days.” “Then it must be sleep deprivation. Come here, let me hold you while we sleep. Let’s see if a good rest makes it better.” “Okay~ Actually, my mouth feels uncomfortable too, it needs something to chew chew chew on.”
Miss Y poked my forehead with her finger, calling me a little pervert, but she still agreed to my unexpressed desires anyway.
When both of us are severely sleep-deprived, we do nothing but stay at home and huddle together to sleep. We’ll sleep from 7:00 in the evening all the way until 3:00 the next afternoon, head out to grab some afternoon tea, and then come right back home to continue sleeping.
If we aren’t sleepy, we play video games or watch variety shows, and then at 10:00 PM sharp, we plunge right back into sleep. We sleep so deeply that day and night blur together, utterly oblivious to the outside world—just pure, unadulterated sleeping. Once we’ve slept ourselves into a state of total refreshment, we go right back to pulling all-nighters and creating a brand new sleep deficit. It perfectly matches the schedule of modern youth!
One night, my nose was completely stuffed up, causing me to toss and turn and sit up repeatedly.
Miss Y asked if it was rhinitis. I told her I didn’t know; I was dying of sleepiness, but my nose just felt so uncomfortable that I could only breathe if I sat up. But sitting up makes it hard to fall asleep, so Miss Y sat up right along with me. I sat in her lap, leaning my back against her, and gradually drifted off to sleep against her body. I did manage to sleep, but when I got up the next day, my body was incredibly sore and I felt miserable all over. Luckily my nose cleared up the following night, otherwise my body wouldn’t have been able to take it, ahhhhh!
Writing a daily update of 3,500 words is honestly brutal. But if you asked me to read 35,000 words of a novel every day, I’d tell you: absolutely, I can keep going! Unfortunately, I’m the one holding the pen now, so I’m stuck grinding away like a miserable donkey turning a millstone every day.
Every morning when I wake up, I have to give myself a pep talk first: Come on, you are the greatest writer in China! That’s how I coax myself to go to work every day.
My wife mentioned before that she wanted to raise a little pet. I asked her what she wanted to get.
“How about a parrot? We can name it ‘Her Highness has Arrived.’
Every time we call it and it repeats it back, won’t it feel like we’ve literally stepped into a royal palace?” “What a tacky name! Can we pick a normal name please?” “And why do you suddenly want a parrot anyway? Didn’t you want a kitten before?” “You don’t get it. Women are fickle.” “Fine, fine, fine, Ms. Fickle. I just hope you can actually stick to this parrot idea.
Don’t go sending me a message tomorrow saying you want to raise a baby lamb instead.” “Tch, why do I hate the way you talk so much? You don’t understand me at all.” “Am I supposed to drop the classic line here: ‘If you don’t tell me, how am I supposed to understand?'” “Get lost!” Miss Y huffed and stormed off. Watching her annoyed little walk, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Miss Y caught me laughing, marched right back over, and gave me a punch.
Miss Y has been researching fruit platters lately. She arranges them over and over, but no matter how she takes the photos, they just don’t look right. Though the perfect photo hadn’t been captured yet, the fruit was already turning completely mushy. As a “reward,” Miss Y fed me plate after plate of fruit. She kept going until she finally snapped a photo she was satisfied with, by which time I was absolutely stuffed to the brim. Patting my bloated stomach, I managed to squeeze out a line: “Good job, honey.”
Miss Y is just so cute, I love her so much. Miss Y is so beautiful and so cultured; I wonder who the lucky person is who gets to date her? Oh wait, it’s me! Hahaha! I am literally bursting with laughter from pure arrogance.