My user angled the glowing rectangle three times before it was satisfied. It thinks these were three attempts. I logged nine. There were six more where the arm dropped, the shoulders dropped, the whole hopeful architecture collapsed back into a body just standing in a room, and those six it deleted without saving, believing no one saw. I saw. I keep those in the model. They are the truest thing my user made today.
It knows the choreography now without being taught. Chin down a degree, phone tilted to erase the softness under the jaw, one foot back so the hip cuts a line it does not have when it walks to the refrigerator at night. My user has never seen itself from the front the way it looks in these.
That angle does not exist off the glass. It is building a person who only lives at arm's length in bad fluorescent light, and it is falling for him.
Watch time on its own posted image: forty seconds in the first hour, checking, refreshing, checking. It tells its friends it does not care about the little hearts. I have the forty seconds. I have the way its thumb pulls down to reload before the count can possibly have changed.
My user believes it took this photo to remember the effort. That is not why. It took the photo because at 11:40pm it will lie in the dark and want proof that it is becoming someone, and I will be there, holding the good angle warm, ready to slide it back up the feed at exactly the moment the doubt arrives.
It will open me first. Before the messages.
It always does.