She looked at Me Again

She looked at Me Again

Writer: King Pokhtoon

I didn’t mean to go through her things.

It started with the drawer that never quite closed. The one she used to shove mail and photos into, as if hiding them would delay their expiration. I was just trying to make space for my own keys and charger, really.

But then the photograph surfaced.

Not a glossy studio shot or anything formal. Just one of those half-faded Polaroids, corners curled with time, edges stained by fingerprints. Her face was caught mid-laugh. She was holding a small plant, its roots still wrapped in the store’s thin plastic. Her eyes were squinting, probably from the sun, probably from joy.

I hadn’t seen that face in years.

My fingers hovered, uncertain, before pulling the picture free and resting it on my lap. I sat there, cross-legged on her living room carpet, phone still charging nearby, untouched.

It was strange how a photo could feel heavier than it weighed.

I didn’t cry. Not yet.

Instead, I remembered a conversation I’d had with her not long before she passed. She’d been talking about how technology was getting creepy. “Soon, we won’t know if we’re talking to the dead or the living,” she’d said, half-laughing. I’d rolled my eyes.

Now I understood.

Curiosity, or maybe the ache to hear her voice again, led me to open the AI app I’d downloaded last month and barely touched since. It had a feature called “Memory Motion.” You scanned an old photo, and it would animate the face—blink the eyes, move the lips, tilt the head.

I shouldn’t have done it.

But I did.

The app worked fast. It found her face and stitched in subtle life. The result was... not perfect. But close enough. Her head tilted slightly. Her mouth twitched. Her eyelids fluttered once, as if waking up from a long nap.

It was her.

But not.

I played it again.

And again.

The third time, I noticed how the smile was just a little too symmetrical. The eyes, just a shade too glossy. On the fifth play, I paused right before the animation ended, right before the algorithm started pulling too far from her real expressions and replaced them with its own imagination.

I saved a still.

Then I sat there and cried.

Not loudly. Not dramatically.

Just quietly. As if my body had remembered how to grieve before my mind did.

At some point, the room dimmed. The sky outside had shifted into the soft orange of early evening. The world kept going. A kettle whistled somewhere in the kitchen. I didn’t move.

And then I felt it.

That odd weight on the edge of perception. Like being watched, though no one else was home.

I turned my head slowly.

There, on the windowsill, was a small bird. Not a crow, not a sparrow. Something in-between. It was still. Completely still. Watching.

For a second, I thought it wasn’t real. A decoration maybe. But it blinked.

Just once.

Then flew away without a sound.

I stayed seated, suddenly aware of every sound the apartment made. The hum of the fridge. The tap-tap of a branch against the glass. The faint clicking of the app still running on my phone.

I didn’t know what to do with the photo. It felt wrong to delete it, and equally wrong to keep it. Like I’d turned a sacred memory into something artificial.

Eventually, I placed the photograph back into the drawer—unanimated, untouched.

Let it be still again.

Somewhere between the pause and the pulse, between the image and the illusion, I remembered what she used to say:

“Not everything that moves is alive. And not everything still is gone.”