Forty Drafts

I asked a chatbot to write the perfect text to my ex. It wrote forty drafts. I sent none.

It was a Sunday, 2 AM, a bottle of cheap rosé, and bad decisions. I typed: "Write a message to my ex that sounds casual but makes him miss me." The chatbot gave me options. A witty one. A mysterious one. A "no pressure but I saw a dog that looked like yours" one.

His name was Luca. Two years. We broke up in April, over a call, with him sounding more tired than sad. I'd been rehearsing the first message ever since. I'd never found the right words.

So I tried again. "Make it more mature." Draft ten. "Make it funnier." Draft nineteen. "Make it sound like I'm doing great." Draft twenty-six. I tweaked. Rewrote. Compared. Deleted. By draft thirty, I was crying into a pillow, quietly, the way you do when someone's asleep next door.

By draft forty, I stopped and scrolled up.

I read them all again. One after another. A wall of carefully polished sentences. Smart, breezy, impossible to misread.

And I noticed something.

Every single one, buried somewhere in the middle, had the same three words. Not suggested by the chatbot. Added by me. Every time I'd edited. Every time I'd "fixed" it.

"I miss you."

Forty drafts.

And I'd never once managed to write a version that didn't say it.