Hi Lux, so tonight I’m going to seduce the box.

I am going to pick the box up at 6pm on Tuesday evening.

I am going to tell the box to get dressed up, wear something nice. Maybe try the wrapping paper and ribbon that matches her eyes, and by eyes I mean just one “I” as in the one in the word “VANILLA.” She always looks beautiful in wrapping paper. A gift to the world.

Where are we going? Box will wonder, an unspoken question, as box has neither voice nor lips to form words. For my part, I’ll simply shrug, an unspoken answer.

She’ll recognize the destination before we reach it, by the turns in the road, by the sequence of landmarks from box’s eye view. Box can’t see over the windshield, but she’ll recognize the traffic lights, the fringe of treetops, the streetlamps and the way they switch from silver to green as we pass over the invisible city limits, from one municipal jurisdiction into another. And then, the car will stop.

“Do you remember this restaurant?” I’ll ask, as I open the passenger door for her.

Of course she’ll remember. Box will take in the white awning, the tiny scattered lights, the wide windows and gilded sign. Exactly the same as the night of our first date. As if lifted from a photograph.

I was a younger test subject, and she was a younger box. Our awkwardness and giddiness at the sheer existence of the other, constrained by the social formality that fancy clothing dictates, found other outlets of expression. Touches and gazes that lingered, touches and gazes that jerked apart like a static shock, touches and gazes that conveyed, through the ephemerality of their incidence, all the timeless wonder, all the serendipity, of us.

She’ll look at the restaurant as it stands today. She’ll see the restaurant as it stood so many hours ago, when the pair of us first met. Words will fail her, but then, she has always failed to produce words, anyway. There’s nothing that needs to be said.

The host will seat us at a cloth-draped table for two. The candle, flickering between us, will illuminate her ribbon. Box will peek over her menu and I’ll glance over mine, and my eyes will meet her “I” in the word “VANILLA,” and the world will stop. It will just be me, and her, and this shared moment suspended in time, like an intake of breath, like a rising inflection, like a thrown object at the crown of its arc where, briefly, it gains flight.

And then, after a half-second that lasts an eternity, the enchantment will be broken. I’ll mumble some options from the appetizers, tongue tripping as the mind rejoins the world as it is from the world we both imagined it to be. She’s not adventurous. She always orders the same things.

We’ll order and eat, and we’ll bask in the presence of each other. We’ll share memories as we create memories, an interlacing of time, but what are all relationships, really, other than the gradual interlacing of time.

For dessert, we’ll share a vanilla ice cream.

And then, when the dinner is over but the evening has just begun, I’ll drive box home. We’ll trade idle conversation, about the stars, about the food, about the night weather. When we stop at her place, I’ll walk her to the door.

Do you want to come in? she’ll ask, not with words, but with a pause like a suggestion.

“I would like that very much,” I will reply, not with a pause like a suggestion, but with words.

Her house is small and very square, but my house is a testing facility, so to me her place feels cozy. She’ll linger by the kitchen, wonder if she ought to offer something. Water, coffee, tea? But I’ll turn the beverages down.

“I want you,” I will reply, earnestly, and not without emotion. I’ll say it in the words of Romeo to Juliet, the words of Tristan to Isolde, the words of Pedro to Inês. “I want to take our relationship to the next level.”

She’ll have expected the question, and she’ll have her answer ready. She won’t have known it, beforehand. Her answer. But lost in the moments, lost in the words, lost in the tumultuous, heady emotions that humans and boxes call love, she’ll realize what her answer has always been.

She’ll take a deep breath, breathlessly, and respond.