If no one else knows, you know. You know how many personal battles I fought against artificial intelligence. You know how I fumed and fussed when it got embedded in every app. You called me paranoid when I stopped using my writing app and reverted to the good old pen and paper through which I could not be spied on by that unnatural phenomenon.

You know how Negasi became the image of the devil himself in my mind, when he first came out with Dev. You know how many poems I wrote about flesh and blood playing God.

Did you not call me an outdated thing flowing against the currents of change, on the day you left for Dev?

Ire, you know, if no one else knows, how shrouded I became in my writing. It became my food, my air, my all.

I refused to see the rot and wear in the home I’d once loved. I could not look at the creases without feeling the itch to smooth them over. Without the itch becoming an obsession.

But after you left, I realized I was shrouded in you too. You, as much as my art—even more—shielded me from reality.

Ire, I fought a good fight, and then I stopped fighting. Stopped swimming against the tide.

I let the waters of change carry me into the MaDe pod, and through to Dev.

And on my first day here, I wondered why I even spent all that time fighting

Why I didn’t just come with you when you first asked.

It was peaceful, Ire. Perfect. Like you said it would be. It was complete.

Well, almost.

It did not take me too long to realize that the lack of creases in itself was a crease I struggled to smooth over. And there was no you.

I searched for you, Ire. So much so, I did not write one line of poetry. So much so, I thought I was hallucinating when I caught a whiff of your scent. I only grew sure that I wasn’t, when I sniffed it again.

Ire, hope dashed against firewalls, over and over. Your scent was a glitch. I followed the glitch.

That was how I came upon an unfinished poem floating about. Just two lines, the second one incomplete. But the first line, Ire…

I knew that line.

I wrote that line. On paper. On earth. You tore it up on one of those days you and I argued about Dev. You tore it up in my face, and I never completed it.

I didn’t know what it meant, to now see this here. But I felt, very strongly, that it would lead me to you.

I felt that I had to complete it. I felt that I had to—

Erased. And with me gone, three words added to the second line, completing it.

“I pull frantically at the thread

If the fabric comes undone, let it”

Written by Henrietta