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You look them up on your phone, constantly, obsessively, whenever you are not working on something for him, or at work with him, or allowed that precarious indulgence of simply existing in the same space as him that has become so rare. Rarer, ever since your change of allegiance; which means you look them up again and again, compulsively, in every pocket of time that isn’t already occupied by his presence.
You palm yourself even as you type with trembling hands. You never save anything and you make sure of that, way too afraid to make it accessible on a whim, as if the forced impermanence of these wasn’t part of the ritual, by now. It's a futile attempt to shame yourself out of it, under the half hope that if you make it inconvenient enough, humiliating enough, you might finally stop. But you don’t stop.
Because you need him.
Constantly, obsessively. Need him in your mind, embedded at every second of your life, threaded through in your every thought in a way that can’t be reasoned with, or managed, or neatly contained. Need to act on the way you carry him, branded on your skin with violent punches that feel like kisses, scrapes and bruises you can press on to feel close.
So you look them up, all the time.
You still had an alarm for that kind of thing not long ago, pics and videos novel enough to hold your attention for a moment, scraps of news to gather and consume in the privacy of your own time. Cute and interesting, simple, careless creatures paddling in murky water before flashing away, clumsily waddling across the riverbanks towards their burrows with a likeness that is only vaguely reminiscent of his figure—close, but never close enough.
Your eyes wouldn’t take the whole animal in, back then. Only fragments of it, you would break them apart to catalogue the pieces that map onto him.
That stopped when you found these.
The naturalist footage never came close to making you feel quite like this. With these, you are at a point where you barely think about dissecting, lazer zoomed, what could or could not pass as his, just taking the entirety of this domesticated specimen offered on a silver platter.
This is not him. You do know that. You really, really do.
You know him by memory. Size. Weight. The shine of his pelt, the stretchiness of his webbing and the length of his claws; how much strength it takes to pin him down, where to press—how hard, how long—to cut his airflow until his breath stutters, until you have him look at you through glassy eyes. You know the breadth of his sturdy shoulders, the length of his ribcage. You know of that place where tail meets torso, and the hidden seam of him right there. That entrance you have never seen, but you have dreamed of in punishingly exquisite detail.
His image has been burnt beneath your skin, above your head. You can squeeze your eyes shut, and the afterimage will stay beneath your eyelids clear as day, imposed there by design, your own design, to alleviate the withdrawal that comes from the in-betweens of his absence.
All this to say, this is not him.
And it has you questioning some things about yourself, because it doesn't feel that wrong.
It should be worrying, though. That’s the part that unsettles you most, if you let yourself think about it too long. The way your body responds anyway, well past any discernment. It’s like looking at something that vaguely resembles food, shaped correctly, colored correctly, and mistaking it for sustenance, convincing yourself it might fill you if you just look hard enough; except there’s no comparison to any of this a sane person could make, no justification for what you do, and it makes you feel so sick because you get one look of those little, harmless reels, and you have to push the heel of your palm against the straining fabric of your leg, stiff and desperate for some crude pressure (not gentle. Never gentle, he wouldn’t be. You wouldn’t want him to be), and it does nothing but amplify your hunger. It spreads, uneasy crawl looming over you for doing this to the innocuous shots uploaded by some kids that love their small companion enough to share their fondness with the world, unaware of the existence of the likes of you.
It is so wrong. This is an animal. Proper mindless one.
It’s still disarming, how docile and well-kept it looks, softened by a life without threat, neat claws perfectly trimmed—a rarity both in the wild and amongst other house pets you’ve encountered. It reminds you of him, in the most superficial ways. Still, it’s nowhere close to him and his brilliant, handsome self, nothing more than an innocent pet rolling lazily on suburban grass, basking in the sun in a way he'd never do: belly up and relaxed down to the bone.
And still, the mere sight of the paling teal of its underside has you painfully hard with the prospect that below its faded gut there is a tail, and between that tail and the belly there's a hole.
It's not his hole. But you do get to see this one, for half a second, rosey pink and so inviting—or what you perceive as inviting, in your delusions—and most days you don't even try to pretend that it is him, and it still makes you so, so hard, to imagine kissing the rim of that opening with your tip before slowly, carefully, guiding yourself so the broad head of your cock nudges against that tiny, moist pucker, pushing your way in until it goes pliant and you make a whimpering mess out of it; invading his unique anatomy until it accomodates you, marking him, branding him as yours, just like you are his.
(Like you'd be, if he'd have you.)
Until you remember again, this is not him.
It always makes you question yourself, for just a moment. Is it really the effect he has on you, or are you just that much of a freak?
Like this, the question isn't clear.
There's always six out of thirty seconds of clarity, timewise speaking, that find sense out of you and force you to acknowledge how messed up it is that you even have to ask, would any platypus suffice?
Six seconds are insufficient to answer that, so there’s not enough time to ask the subsequent, more dangerous question: would I have had any platypus, if I hadn't met him?
(You like to think you wouldn’t, the few times you get that far.
That whatever you’ve become is because of him, and for him, and could not exist otherwise.
That this is all his fault.)
Maybe he's waved his way so deep inside your brain that you are conditioned now, to look at a bill, and a belly, and a furry tail, and the barely-there edges of a hole hidden under light teal fur, and feel the urge to work your way rushed, violent, hungry, towards completion.
You don’t get long enough to decide.
Six seconds at a time are not enough to ponder. Thirty seconds, though, are more than enough to come, hot stripes jetting across your stomach, dripping to your trousers. Enough to force your mind empty of any rational thought you might have had within the last minute.
As such, you'll never know.