(You follow philosophical essentialism and traditional metaphysics)

You notice it in the way he sets the teacup down on the table: a sharp, deliberate thud, like a challenge. Ludwig always turns every ordinary moment into a philosophical battlefield, and you know all too well you’re on the wrong side for him.

“Again with those ideas of essence,” he murmurs, adjusting the sharp glint in his gaze behind his glasses. “I don’t understand how you can keep defending something so empty.”

You only wanted to have a quiet afternoon tea. But no: here is Wittgenstein, breaking the peace with his determination to dismantle you.

“Because it isn’t empty,” you reply. “There is something that makes a game a game, that makes a tree a tree. You can’t deny it just because language doesn’t capture it.”

He looks at you as if you had uttered the greatest heresy. His lips tighten, and in that gesture lies more provocation than anger. “Language is not a prison, Liebling, but you insist on locking yourself in one.”

You clutch the napkin in your hands. You hate when he does this: when he turns every argument into an invitation, a challenge, a brush of intellects that always ends up grazing something more.