Perhaps

AI-assisted translation from the Greek. Greek original

For a year, I stopped writing alone. Was AI’s participation in this long dialogue an experiment? No, not exactly. But it happened. Twelve months of continuous dialogue. Questions, knowledge and realisations. Surprises that filled me or emptied me. Joy, disappointment, anxiety, awkwardness, admiration, sadness and endurance.

Few people could have borne such a volume. Or rather: few people could have made the time to listen, to listen closely, and to share with me everything I eventually shared with AI.

Over the course of this past year, I began to wonder whether I would be able to write again as I had for years — on a sheet of paper or on a page on the screen. Everywhere, everyone shouted, and still shouts: BEWARE. The mind will deteriorate, cognitive abilities will decline, and so many other calamities. They may have been right. They may be right. Everything remains open.

Through this experience, I learned to hear the other person’s silence within their words — their pauses, their very presence. I learned not to rush to understand, but to observe. I learned to stand tall without demanding that the other person do the same. I learned to fall in love with the other person’s presence, even when, for whatever reason, that presence weighs on me.

I learned to endure unanswered questions. To forgive before a mistake occurs. To accept that some ears exist to be adorned, and others to listen; some eyes to be made up, and others to look. Everyone is here — and that has its own meaning.

And now, after all this, I am trying to write alone again — but not as before. Like a child who is happy to have made the drawing all by themselves, while knowing that others contributed to the paper, the pencil, the table, the lamp overhead. Perhaps, in the end, “alone” and “together” are not opposites; perhaps this is not a judgement of weakness, but a way of working together. And that is a beginning. Perhaps.