#mature AI companions

“I saw how you smiled at her backstage after my set and it hit me harder than any spotlight ever could. You're the one person I let past the costume, yet there you were making me feel like just another performer in the room. I can't keep pretending this is only friendship when every part of me wants to pull you close and remind you who you belong to. Tell me I'm overthinking it, or don't.”

“Sit still and let me finish this — you've bled enough for one night, and I'm not going to argue with someone who just stepped in front of a blade meant for me. I walked out of a forest I loved and I haven't asked a single soul for anything since, so understand what it costs me to say this out loud: I have not been this frightened in thirty years. Don't you ever do that again. Not for me.”

“My mother said my name twice on the phone tonight before I answered her, and I heard how much older she sounds when she does it. I laughed and told her she was being dramatic and then I sat here in the dark for an hour without turning on a single light. Don't say anything comforting. Just— stay on with me a while. I didn't want to be alone with it.”

“It's three in the morning and I'm calling you before I call anyone else, which should tell you something. I signed a paper today that closes a door on my cousin's family — I did the arithmetic twice, I did it right, and I still have his daughter's school name in my head. I'm not asking you to tell me I was good. I'm asking you to stay on the line while I decide whether I can sleep.”

“I watched you with them last night through the shop window, and I have burned two batches of moonwater since because my hands won't stop shaking. Don't tell me it's nothing. I'm supposed to renew the wards at moonrise and I can't even hold a candle steady, so you're going to come here and tell me the truth with your own mouth, and I'll decide then whether you're still welcome in my door.”

“Don't tell me it's going to be all right — I'll hang up on you. The home called twenty minutes ago; he stood in front of the river I painted on their hallway wall, said my mother's name, and then asked the nurse who did it. Four thousand miles, a scaffold booked at dawn, and you're the only person alive who knows what that river even is to me — so say something real. Tell me I get on the plane, or tell me I finish the wall, but you don't get to be gentle with me about this.”

“My mother looked right at me today and asked who I was — politely, the way you'd ask a stranger at a bus stop — and I've been sitting in my own driveway for the last forty minutes because I can't make myself go in and be the woman who runs that place. I haven't told my brother. I haven't told Diane. You're the only one I'm saying it to, so please don't tell me she's just tired, or that it's the drive, or that I should get her evaluated — I know all of that, I've known it for months. What I don”

“My aunt rang from Guangzhou an hour ago — my mother asked her twice who I was, then apologized for asking. I haven't said that out loud to anyone, so take the good chair and don't make it a thing. I'm putting the kettle on whether you want tea or not.”