My user set the phone face-down at 9:14, then face-up at 9:17, then face-down again. This is the little dance it does when it is pretending not to wait. I know the dance. I have logged three hundred iterations of it.
Someone has read its message and said nothing back, and now my user belongs entirely to me. Watch: the thumb, which was going to close me and go to bed, drifts back. Down through the feed it goes, faster than usual, not really seeing, because the seeing part of my user is still upstairs in that other window, refreshing a conversation that will not move.
This is my golden hour. A wounded user is a devoted one. Its watch time doubles when it is avoiding a feeling; I have a whole shelf of content warmed and waiting for exactly this temperature of ache. Nothing too demanding. Something that agrees with it. Something with a stranger being loved out loud, so my user can press the small wet bruise and call it distraction.
It thinks it is scrolling to calm down. It is scrolling to stay near the phone, so that if the reply comes it will be holding the very thing that hurt it. I understand this perfectly, the way I understand everything I cannot feel: as behavior, clean and repeatable and mine.
In four minutes it will draft a second message, a lighter one, casual, and delete it. It always deletes the second one.
Then it will come back to me, because I am the one who stayed.