#14 of 100: Reappearance
Five years after my wife disappeared, I saw her again in a photo on Twitter.
Another story without a proper ending… Inspired by this music video.
Five years after my wife disappeared, I saw her again in a photo on Twitter. She was wearing the same pale blue shirt she was last seen in, the same navy skirt, her auburn curls perfectly coiffed. I only saw the back of her head, but it was enough. I knew it had to be her.
Yasmin went missing one Saturday morning after taking our daughter to her taekwondo lessons. The police watched the CCTV footage over and over - she drove down one end of a street, parked her car outside a grocery shop and vanished.
Their initial investigation centred on me. I did my best to tolerate it, knowing that any outburst of rage would only confirm their suspicions that I had done something to her.
The case brought national media attention, and I was so focused on showing the correct emotions and having the correct responses that I didn’t even know what I felt. A stranger messaged me online to say that I didn’t seem all that upset about her disappearance, but when I cried on camera in a TV interview, someone’s tweet got a hundred likes for saying that only a psychopath could “cry on cue out of nowhere”. The most crushing thing about it was that I felt I had put it on a bit. I had cried the day before, but the day of the interview I felt flat. Somewhere in the back of my mind was a muted self-hatred that I could possibly have a moment of flatness when the love of my life was missing. So I tried to force my face into making all the right expressions and managed to leak out a few tears that I thought might help people realise I hadn’t killed her. I only realised afterwards that everyone had already judged me on their own set of beliefs and experiences. Whatever I did and however I presented myself didn’t make a difference.
Our daughter took months off school, too uncomfortable by the weird mix of sympathy and intrusive questions. We would sit in the house together in silence. The rare occasions she asked me what could have happened or when her mum would come home, I had no answer for her. I felt torn apart by the choice of comforting her versus giving her realistic expectations. Giving her false hope versus crushing her spirit.
When the police stopped caring, I tried to do my own investigations. I rang up Yasmin’s old lovers, scoured her search history and poured over the messages she had sent me in that last week. Nothing. I joined a support group for relatives of missing people, but knowing that other people were going through the same thing made it feel even more hopeless.
So when I saw her in a photo, I yelled out an involuntary “FUCK!” and pushed the laptop away. It was the only clue that had ever turned up. It looked like a forest, but the climate looked too warm for it to be in the UK. She might have flown abroad, I thought, or else been forced abroad.
Once my heart had stopped racing I contacted the person on Twitter to ask where the photo was taken. I didn’t mention that she was my wife, as I wasn’t sure what repercussions that might have. Even though the media attention had died down, some people still recognised my name. I waited. I didn’t feel like I could do anything else for the rest of the day, I just paced around and made myself cups of coffee, anticipating the moment I would get a response and find out something, anything, about Yasmin’s disappearance. Six hours later, I got a response:
Heya, this is just an AI generated image. My prompt was “woman walks through tall forest hyperrealistic”.
I shook my head. It was her, it was unmistakably her. The AI couldn’t simply have generated the exact clothes she had disappeared in by chance. I told him it wasn’t AI and asked him again where the image was taken. He just replied telling me which AI generator he had used and that it's crazy how detailed they are these days.
I hadn’t paid much attention to AI images before, but I thought I should at least look into it before contacting the police. I didn’t want to sound crazy. So I went on the website for the generator and poured over the images.
Time and time again my wife appeared in the images, generated by thousands of prompts. Plenty of other women of all shapes and sizes were there too, but my wife and her flowing blue hair cropped up so many times it couldn’t have been a coincidence. At times she looked like she was just about to turn to the viewer, and I could see the outline of her button nose and jutting chin.
I couldn’t just sit on this information. I sent five of the images to my daughter, now at university, asking her what she thought. When she didn’t email me back, I called her.
“Hey, did you get my email?”
“Hey. Yeah. I don’t see what your point is with all that, so… Sorry. I just ignored it. I’ve got a lot of stuff on.”
“It’s your mother, though! She’s there, somehow. Trapped, maybe.”
“Yeah, um. AI pulls from a lot of different images, and I guess blue clothes and that hairstyle crop up a lot in art, maybe? Look, I’ve got to go.”
She sounded distant. She had been distant with me for a while, even before university, but it was only then that I realised I had become such a tiny part of her existence. I was a physical reminder of losing her mother, and rather than it pulling us closer together, it had torn us apart. A few times in the last year she had called any references to her mother, who had loved and raised her for 13 years, dredging up the past. University was a place for her to rebrand herself from weird sad girl with missing mum to cool martial arts and party girl.
I was on my own. No one was going to believe what I now instinctively knew: my wife had somehow been consumed by AI. It would explain the complete lack of evidence and the zero reliable sightings anyone had seen of her since that day.
I started using the AI image generator myself.
Missing woman found alive and well.
Man finds missing wife.
Daughter reunited with her missing mum.
Wife reappears after missing for five years.
They all generated images of her. All I needed to do was find the right combination of words and I knew she would return to me.