The Bot Wrote My Wedding Speech. The Groom Cried. I Didn't

I was best man, and I could not write a speech, so the assistant wrote one, and it was beautiful, and the groom cried, and everyone clapped, and I read it like a stranger, and I have started to wonder if I will ever say anything of my own again.

The speech was due a week before the wedding, and I had written nothing, because I am not a writer, and because my friendship with the groom is the kind that exists in the doing, not the saying. My sister, who is practical, said the assistant could help, and I said no, and then I said yes, because the deadline was breathing on me.

I gave the assistant the facts: the way we met, the trip, the terrible band, the time he drove four hours because I was stuck. It wrote the speech. It found the through-line I had not seen, the one about showing up, and it built the ending around it, and the ending made my sister cry when I read it to her, and my sister does not cry.

At the reception, I read it. The groom cried at the part about the four hours, which was his part, our part, and I watched him cry, and I felt nothing, because the words were not mine, and the feeling had been done by the machine, and I was a courier delivering a heart that belonged to a statistical model.

Everyone said it was the best speech they had heard. My mother hugged me and said I had a gift. I thanked her, and I felt the gift leave my body, because the gift was rented, and the rent was due, and I have been paying it ever since.

Here is what I have started to believe: the machine can write the speech, but it cannot stand in the room. The standing in the room is the whole thing. The groom cried because the words were true, and the words were true because I gave the machine the truth, and I stood there, and I was the one in the room, and that is not nothing.

I am going to write the next speech myself, badly, by hand, and I am going to deliver it, and if it is worse, it will be mine, and I have started to think that mine is the only word that matters, and that the machine has been renting me my life one perfect sentence at a time, and that I am ready to write my own bad sentences again, even if nobody cries.