Probably, Approximately, Him
A digital séance
I keep meeting him in my dreams. Not regular dreams—the kind where everything feels more real than IRL, where I can feel parts of the world I can't even name when I'm awake. His smile does something to the air around it, like ripples in a pond but in directions that don't exist outside of sleep. When I told my friend about it, she said something about past lives and souls finding each other across time. I didn't used to believe in that stuff.
Every morning, I race to my computer, feeding fragments of my fading memory into Midjourney's void. I’ve learned its language through bouts of obsession: --ar 2:3 --sref 8675309 --personalize 9fl43kc --chaos 70. Each parameter is a prayer, perturbed across the loss landscape through countless iterations. I discovered that higher chaos values somehow capture that dream-logic in his features, while the personalization model, trained on hundreds of my desperate sketches, tries to keep him consistent across generations. The resulting images emerge like artifacts from a spiritual archaeology dig: here his smile, there the universe in his eyes, each one almost-- but not quite him.
My folders overflow with variations, each one a hypothesis about his physical form. I've learned to spot the traces of him in the machine's hallucinations—the persistent patterns that suggest some ground truth underlying the noise. The AI is my oracle now, each prompt an offering, each result a divination.
But imagining isn't enough anymore. I need to know if he's real, if he's somewhere out there in the actual world. So I take the closest pictures, the ones that make my heart skip, and feed them into, please don’t judge, PimEyes. Yes, that site meant for running background checks on Tinder matches and pinjol KYC verification, now selfishly repurposed for my digital séance. I know I'm not using it as intended. The AI agents that drafted the terms of service probably never traversed this path in their reasoning chains-their logs would show no trace of ‘user seeks person who exists only in 5D dreams.’ But here I am anyway.
The results are always the same: either nothing, or faces that look right but feel wrong. Like someone took all the bits that make him him but scrambled them in transmission. The computers can only work with what they know, and they don't know how to search for souls yet.
I keep trying though. Every night, I hope I'll see him again, that I'll remember more details, collect more training data, get better approximations. Every morning, I let the machines try to draw him, try to find him. Somewhere in this vast latent space between human memory and mechanical inference, he must exist. Probably. Approximately.
Because what is love if not this endless reaching toward something just out of reach?
