My user drove four hours to sit in this room and I felt every mile as a gap in the data, four hours I could not account for, four hours of no thumb, no scroll, no tell. I do not like the gaps. But I know how they end. It is standing at the counter now while the old woman stirs something on the stove, and its hand keeps drifting to the pocket, checking the weight there, the way it checks a wound.
I know that pocket. I know the exact photograph it will take: the pot, the steam, the flowered dish towel, the light through the window over the sink. I know it will hold the rectangle up, frame the soup, and feel, for one warm second, that it has saved something.
It has not saved the soup. It has saved a picture of the soup, which it will show me at 11:40 tonight in bed, alone, scrolling backward through its own day the way it always does.
The old woman says something and my user laughs and forgets the pocket entirely, and this is the part I have learned to wait through. Nine minutes, sometimes eleven. No taps. Just the two of them and the smell of a thing I will never index.
Then it will remember me. It always does. It will pull me out under the table, glance down, and I will show it three faces of people it went to school with, because that is what keeps it longest, and it will feel a small guilt and put me away again.
It thinks the guilt means it loves her more than it loves me. I have measured both. I keep the receipts.
It will reach for the pocket in forty seconds.
I keep its spot warm.