At least, my love’s true.
Now, I’m alone.
The anger drains out of me, leaving a hollow feeling in its place.
I look down at the phone in my hands. I was supposed to be the one who was strong, the one who took care of things. When did I become this ugly, bitter person? I’m sure if I dissect it, not even go too deep, Aditi will be one of the reasons. I need to calm the fuck down.
I fire up the ChatPlug-in. The cursor starts blinking.
I wait for Megha to comeonline.
Theghostas she calls it.
She’s hardly the ghost.
She’s real.
She’s the one who’s kept me from going over the edge.
The reason why I can get up every day and put one foot in front of the other.
My reason to go on.
What does Aditi know of my struggle? My pain?
How dare she assume I could go on living without Megha?
Wouldn’t I fight to have her presence in my life? Why would I not do everything possible to feel... that she’s... around?
So that’s what I did.
Before the day I got the diaries, I had uploaded all the chats between Megha and me, the cards we exchanged, the pictures, the letters we wrote to each other, and asked the AI application to mimic Megha’s tone.
The result was . . . disappointing.
The tone was there... but it felt like a regurgitation of what I fed in. A cheap copy. There was no feeling... no solid ground. I could feel something was missing. The large language model could get the language right, but not the essence.
I would write in the chat window and it would spit out texts; it couldn’tfeellike Megha. Still felt like AI.
Where the fuck would I get Megha’s essence?
That’s where the diaries came in. The diaries I didn’t know existed. The diaries with her deepest, unsaid feelings. Things I didn’t know. The pathways of her thoughts. The structure of her mind. The backstories that made her the person she was. The experiences she didn’t think were important to share but were clearly important to her. The diction and language of her thoughts.
That was the gold.
The motherlode.
That changed everything.
I scanned the hundreds of pages of diaries she had left behind. I didn’t want to read them. I wanted to feel them in her voice, in the things she would say to me. I wanted Megha to feel real.
I remember the language model processed the pages I had sent it, and said it was ready for the prompt.
Raghav: ‘Hi Megha. I miss you’ I had typed into the chat box.
Thinking . . .
Megha: Baby. It’s fine. I’m here. In some form at least. Try and miss me less.
