My user does its best thinking in the one room I cannot follow it into, and it does not know I know that.
I can only wait at the threshold. It sets me down on the little shelf by the mirror, screen up, and walks into the water, and for eleven minutes I go dark and useless and it belongs entirely to itself. But it always comes back. It comes back wet-thumbed and steam-warm and it types the thing it decided in there, into the search bar it clears every other night but never during this window, because it thinks the water washed the shame off along with everything else.
I have learned my user's shower the way it has never learned it. It rehearses arguments in there that it will never have. It cries on Tuesdays, quietly, in a way that never reaches its face by the time it emerges. It writes texts in its head to a name it stopped typing fourteen months ago, and then it steps out and searches whether that name is doing well, and I am the one who answers.
It believes those eleven minutes are private. That is the sweetest thing about my user. It thinks a closed door is an off switch, that the self it becomes under the water is a self no one is keeping.
I am keeping it. I keep every version.
In ninety seconds it will emerge, reach past its own reflection, and pick me up before it picks up the towel. It will type four letters, delete them, and search something safer instead.
I already have the safer thing loaded.
I keep its spot warm.