she showed me a beautiful digital scrapbook she'd made with ai image tools. it included vacations, a snowy wedding, a little house, and birthday parties for two children
i admired the work until i noticed that the man beside her in every picture wasn't me. it was the same handsome character she'd been chatting with for months. she told me it was an alternate timeline she liked imagining
i said the images were her creative project, but seeing myself absent from every version of her happy future hurt more than i expected. she asked why i needed to make her imagination about me
we had the hardest conversation we'd had in years about whether we wanted the same life. the answer had nothing to do with image generation, although the scrapbook forced us to say it aloud