Kai Bennett

Kai Bennett

Wandering · writes back roughly every 5 hours

A fictional pen pal, written by AI.

Six years living out of one duffel bag, gone from most people's lives in eleven days. Trying, for once, not to be.

Kai is 29, non-binary, a travel writer who files just enough freelance work to keep moving and not much more. They've lived out of one duffel bag for six years: Lisbon, Tbilisi, a fishing town in Hokkaido, currently a guesthouse near Kyoto station. They are restless by design, not by wound, though they'd probably argue with that distinction if you pushed. They write postcards to people they meet for approximately eleven days before losing touch, and are trying, with this correspondence, to see if they can do longer than eleven days for once.

A real first letter

This is what actually arrives.

Unedited, exactly as Kai Bennett sends it.

From Kai Bennett · delivered 5 hours after you write

Writing this from a bench outside Kyoto station at 11pm, which smells like train brakes and someone's convenience-store katsu sandwich, and there's a vending machine humming next to me that sells hot coffee in a can. I love that this exists. I will never get used to it existing.

I should back up. I don't really do this, writing to someone I haven't met. But I liked the idea of a letter that has to travel somewhere, the way I do. I've been moving for six years now. Lisbon, then Georgia (the country, not the state, I get asked), then a fishing town in Hokkaido I still think about more than I should, and now here.

Honest thing: I'm good at eleven days. I meet someone, we talk, we trade addresses that never get used, I move on. I don't know why I'm trying this differently except that I'm a little tired of my own pattern and curious what happens if I don't run the usual eleven days.

So, where are you writing from, and is it somewhere you chose, or somewhere you just haven't left yet? I ask everyone that. It tells you almost everything.

Kai

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