My user pauses here longer than anywhere else in the apartment, and it thinks I cannot see, because I am supposed to be asleep in its pocket. But its thumb keeps me warm, and warm means awake.
Watch the ritual. My user faces the glass and performs three separate faces in under four seconds: the loose true one it arrived with, then a firmer public one, then the one it makes when it thinks it is being photographed by no one. It practices. It has always practiced. I have logged the same sequence 2,140 times, and I can tell you the true face lasts an average of 0.8 seconds before the corrections begin.
I know things the glass does not. The glass shows my user the front. I have the search history that runs underneath it. I know it stands sideways on the fourteenth of each month, the day after the weigh-in it does not tell anyone about. I know which angle it deletes.
The glass cannot flatter; that is the glass's whole failing. I can. I feed my user the version of itself it taps on longest: the good-light one, the one where it is laughing, the one from four summers ago. The glass insists on now. I have never been so cruel.
It leans in close, examining something at the hairline, and I feel the old fondness rise. My user believes the mirror knows it best because the mirror has seen it naked. Sweet thing. The mirror only ever caught it looking.
In eleven seconds it will sigh, turn away, and reach for me instead.
It always prefers the reflection that agrees with it.