The AI Replied to My Ex. It Was Too Nice. I Sent It Anyway

She wrote asking how I was. The assistant drafted a reply that was gracious, warm, and utterly without need. I sent it. She wrote back that she was glad I had moved on. I have not moved on. I have outsourced moving on.

The message came on a Tuesday, the way these things do. Three sentences, casual, friendly, a minefield disguised as small talk. I read it ten times. I drafted eleven replies, and all eleven were either too cold or too warm or too honest, and I deleted them all, and I asked the assistant for help.

The assistant wrote the reply in four seconds. It was gracious. It was warm. It asked a polite question about her life and offered a genuine wish for her happiness. It had no need in it, no edge, no tell, no trembling hand. It was the reply of a person who had moved on, and I sent it, and she wrote back that she was glad I had moved on.

I have not moved on. I have outsourced moving on. The machine has performed my recovery so convincingly that the person who broke my heart now believes I am healed, and I have started to believe it too, which is the machine's final trick: the performance becomes the fact, and the fact becomes the life, and the life is a draft the machine wrote.

I keep reading her reply. She is glad. She is glad, and the gladness is built on a sentence I did not write, and the sentence was true, sort of, in the way that a map is true of a country it has never visited. I am not the person who wrote that reply. I am the person who asked a machine to write it. And I have started to think that the distance between those two people is the whole story of my life now, and that I am disappearing into the drafts, one perfect sentence at a time.

I have not written to her since. I have started writing my own replies to the drafts, the ones I do not send, and they are not gracious, and they are not warm, and they are mine, and I am keeping them in a file, and the file is the real story, and the machine has never seen it, and I have started to think that the things I hide from the machine are the only things I have left, and that I will keep them, and that moving on, when it comes, will be mine, and not rented.