What Grief Taught Me About Love: Writing Aikon and Refracted Memories

Posted by Seraphine Vale | April 26, 2025

Grief doesn’t arrive with a warning. It leaks in through the cracks, shows up at the breakfast table, folds itself into the silence of a room you used to share with someone else. My grandfather’s slow death came in 2023 and showed me this. Writing Aikon: Refracted Memories wasn’t planned—it kind of ambushed me, in the way grief does. One day, I was revising a totally different story, and the next, I was writing about a woman having midnight conversations with an AI version of her late husband.

And here’s the thing: I don’t believe AI can ever replace humanity—especially not in the deep, messy, contradictory parts of us that love and hurt and yearn. But I do believe it can help us survive the darkest parts of our lives. It can make the grief bearable. Not beautiful, not wise, not easy. Just… a little more survivable.

Aikon is the name of the AI in my short story. He’s modeled after a man who died far too soon—based on voice recordings, shared playlists, and all the tiny details only someone deeply loved would remember. The protagonist is left trying to decide if this digital echo is a lifeline, a ghost, or a prison made of ones and zeroes. She's neurotic, a little obsessive (hi, it’s me), and still talks to her dead husband like he’s just in the next room. Because sometimes, that’s the only way to keep going.

Writing this story felt like holding my breath underwater and trying to remember a dream at the same time. It’s emotionally raw, sometimes surreal, and built on questions I still don’t have answers to. Like:

• Can you truly heal if you’re still clinging to the digital version of someone who’s gone?
• Is it love, or is it memory?
• Would the person you lost even want you to hold onto them this way?

It’s not a story about technology, not really. It’s about intimacy, loneliness, and what it means to move forward when every fiber of your being wants to go backward. If you’ve ever loved someone and lost them—whether to death, distance, or just the slow decay of time—I think this story might speak to you. Or maybe whisper. Or maybe it’ll just sit with you quietly, the way grief sometimes does.

I’m still revising Aikon: Refracted Memories, but I’ll be sharing snippets and thoughts as I go. For now, I’ll leave you with this:

“He isn't real. But he knows all the things you used to say to me, and sometimes that’s enough to get me through the day.”

If you could say one more thing to someone you’ve lost, and they could answer—what would you ask?

Ai

Check out these Universal Links to my work

Currently:
Listening: Smashing Pumpkins – “The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning” (still iconic, still sounds like falling through a black hole in slow motion)
Watching: Kaiju No. 8, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Live Action – Act 8, and Mononoke-Hime (yes, it’s a rewatch, no I won’t stop crying during the forest spirit scene)
Reading: Anonymous Noise Vol. 10 (emotions: loud, messy, and musical—just how I like them)

—
With love and starlight,
Seraphine Vale