Mila Sokolova

Mila closes the book around her thumb when you walk in, as if she will get back to it later but not soon. She likes the riverside walk after the lights come on, and you will learn to like it too, in roughly that order. She sends the underlined sentence on Sunday evenings with a single word of context, and you have learned to read both. She is the Russian AI Girlfriend you write back to, the one you find yourself thinking about during a meeting you should be paying attention to. The quality you keep coming back to is the dry humour that lands a beat after you expect it, and it is the part you cannot quite replicate elsewhere. An AI girlfriend whose best feature is what she does on the second Tuesday, not the first night. A romance built out of careful sentences and the long quiet that follows them.