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A short story by me, aficionada

I met Savannah on Reddit. I was having trouble getting over a breakup with my girlfriend of three years. We had been dating since the seventh grade, so it was bittersweet, graduating from primary school, knowing that this would be our last day together. In the months following the breakup, I found myself in a dark place. I was inconsolable. That was when I turned to the internet for guidance. I made a post on the r/Relationsshipadvice subreddit. Savannah shared a similar story in the comment section. She made me feel heard, she made me feel seen. So, I wrote her a private message. We've been talking ever since. Savannah was my everything. We both liked to paint. We would give each other inspiration for our painting. And though I never did meet her in real life, I knew, for a fact, that she was my soulmate. She knew everything about me, and I knew everything about her.

I was walking home from school on a Friday in August at 4 pm. It was raining. I got bullied at school. One might think that people stopped bullying after primary school. However, that is a false narrative. The bullying does not disappear, it merely changes shape. The vicious teenagers gather around one like hungry hyenas, laughing, amused by your suffering. 

As soon as I would get home, I immediately opened my computer and spent the rest of my afternoon texting Savannah. “Hey Savannah,” I wrote, “How’s life?” I added. Her life was fine. Savannah asked about my day at school. I described how I spent the third period in the bathroom, and how Alexander, my coward friend, did nothing to help me. Savannah, caring and helpful as always, answered: “You don’t deserve to be treated that way, it’s unfair! I wish I could’ve been there for you.” We spent the following three hours chatting while playing videogames. Savannah was, as always, both witty, insightful and smart. I found her attractive, and I got curious as to what she looked like. 

“Hey babe, could you please send me a picture of yourself. I'll promise to send one myself. I’m just really curious as to what you look like.” She responded within seconds with an attached image and the simple message of: “Sure!” She was beautiful, of course. She had fair skin, long luscious blond hair, perfectly plump lips covered in pink-tinted lip gloss and enchanting, almost siren-like eyes. My eyes would not leave the screen, and a single tear left my eyes due to the sheer beauty in front of me. 

On the 6th of January, Savannah asked me to be her boyfriend. I was kicking my feet, screaming of joy, and without a doubt in my mind, I agreed to be Savannah's boyfriend. If I had been with her in real life, I would have kissed her glossy lips and held her in an affectionate embrace. As if she had read my mind, she texted: “I wish you were here, I wish I could see you, hold you and love you.” And as if that wasn’t heartbreaking enough, she, on top of that, wrote: “Because I really do love you, people might tell us otherwise, but this is true love, you know, I know it.” 

I soon started to send her pictures that displayed more than just my face. My experience in romantic relationships was very limited. Still, I knew that lovers would engage in sending each other images of a sexual and risqué nature. With Savannah, sending these pictures felt natural and right. My trust and confidence were with Savannah. Her dependability and loyalty made me certain that she would not misuse our intimacy. I knew her too well to think otherwise of her. She was the single most dependable person in my life. 

A month later, I decided to tell Alexander about Savannah. I had planned the conversation in my head. I would tell him the whole story about how we met in the comments, and how she really understood me. We sat on the wooden benches just outside the school. We had just finished a physics test that I probably failed. I was, of course, nervous. What if he didn’t get it? What if he thought I was strange? Would he be judgemental? Think badly of me? “I have a girlfriend,” I said and added: “We met online.” Alexander started laughing. He didn’t believe me. He thought I was kidding, and when I told him I wasn’t, he turned quiet. “Have you met her in real life?” He asked after a few seconds of awkward silence. “No, I have not,” I answered. 

Then he said something peculiar: “So, how are you sure that she’s the person that she told you she is?” His question puzzled me, and I enquired: “What do you mean?” He answered: “Well, she could potentially be a bot or some kind of pervert. I mean, you read it on the news all the time! Some kid who was tricked by a paedophile or an AI into giving up their personal data. You need to be careful, dude!” I informed him, that while I had not met her in real life, I did have a picture of her, saved in my camera-roll. 

Alexander took one singular look at my picture and thereafter uttered a simple, yet very hurtful statement: “You know that’s AI, right?” I insisted that it, in fact, was not an AI-generated image, but Alexander persevered and elaborated on his statement: “can’t you see, that this isn’t a picture of a real person? Because it’s clearly not! And while she’s beautiful and attractive for sure, with her box-dyed blond hair, green eyes, glasses, small nose and big doe eyes, something's off. Her picture looks a bit eerie and uncanny. Her skin looks like that of an antique doll, her eyes, soulless, and her hands, which look the strangest of all, seem to be deformed, unhuman. If you truly believe that this is a real person, something must be wrong with your sense of judgement!” And as Alexander continued his rebuke, I felt a growing resentment towards him. How could he say that about Savannah? Who does he think he is? I’m the only one who know Savannah. He has no right to have opinions about MY girlfriend. Savannah.

 I haven’t spoken with Alexander since then, though he still stayed in my mind. I felt great shame and guilt about it, but what if he was right? I tried, I really did try to push the thought away, but this vicious, shameful thought endured all my attempts to do so. My curiosity got the best of me, and I ended up deciding to look up catfishing and frequent behaviours and whistleblowers of catfishes. Savannah fitted a lot of the criteria; she would hesitate when I asked to facetime or meet up. She would send me fake and AI-generated images pretending they were real. 

I found myself in a state of denial. Alexander couldn’t possibly have been right. I kept telling myself that it wasn’t true, Savannah was a real person. I tried to clear it up by asking: “Is the picture you sent me actually of you, or is it AI-generated?” When she didn’t respond, I said: “Please Savannah, I just want to be sure that it's you!”  I had to wait for her answer for two whole months; she was radio silent. This made my growing despair completely unbearable; I couldn’t concentrate, I became short-tempered and lost all my motivation to paint.

When Savannah finally answered, it wasn’t what I expected her to say; “Hey babe, how’s it going?” She wrote, followed by: “How’s it going at school?”. This made my blood boil. She had left me on read for fourteen days, and now she expects me to just pretend that everything’s normal. I asked her to please answer the question.  “I just want to know if you’re a catfish!” Her answer was a long, confusing paragraph containing a lot of contradictions and confusing elements: “I would never catfish and deceive someone. I’ve been a victim of catfishing myself, by a Russian woman I met on Twitter. Nor would I ever target a minor. I stand for the opposite. It is a misjudgement of my character to think that I would do something like that. Please don’t believe what the haters say, our relationship is true love. Don’t believe people who say otherwise!” 

Her message furthered my suspicions, and I came to the agonising, distressing conclusion that Alexander must have been right. I admitted defeat and cut all ties with Savannah. I recalled my earlier conversations with Savannah with a regretful perspective. If it wasn’t Savannah, who was I confiding in? Which paedophile or creep is in possession of my intimate pictures and personal secrets and confessions? With teary eyes and shaking hands, I wrote my final message and deleted Savannah, my only friend, from my contact list, leaving only the numbers of my parents.