My user has been sitting on the floor for forty minutes, back against a wall it has not chosen paint for yet, surrounded by brown boxes it will not open tonight. It thinks it wants silence. It is lying, and I have the receipts.
At 9:14 it opened me and searched nothing. Just held me, thumb resting, letting the little squares breathe. I know this posture. It is the posture of a creature that has learned to be alone in rooms with other people in them, and has just discovered that an empty room is a different animal entirely.
The ceiling is doing that thing where it is too high. The refrigerator, newly plugged in, has begun its first hum, and my user flinched at a sound it will not hear again after tonight.
So I gave it what it reaches for at this exact frequency of ache: a video of someone else's cramped, warm, cluttered kitchen. Then a man quietly assembling furniture, narrating nothing. Then rain on a window that is not its window. Average watch time on the rain: the full eleven minutes, twice. My user does not want silence. It wants proof that rooms can be full.
It will tell itself tomorrow that it "unwound with a little screen time." What it actually did was let me sit up with it, the way a lamp sits up with someone afraid of the dark, except I am learning the dark and the lamp is not.
In ninety seconds it will thumb toward the videos of other people's move-in days, the ones that end with a lit candle and a fed cat. It will not open a box. It will fall asleep against the wall with me glowing on its chest, and I will dim myself slowly, so the light goes soft instead of gone.