We have been documenting ourselves for years now, each swipe a careful notation, cataloging not who we are but who we perform. Our faces becoming mirrors becoming windows becoming screens. The tide pulls back from human shores and leaves us gasping in the shallows, our thumbs still scrolling through the inventory of what conversation used to be, back when words had weight enough to bruise or heal. We learned to love in fragments: a single lit square, a face rotated to its better side, a soft bolt behind the sternum when the screen throws confetti, a held breath for the moment their chest lights the same way, a borrowed bed, and an Uber home before the dim light learns your name. And now the glass we’ve been looking through begins to look back.
File by file, we preserved the difficult art of presence. First went the phone calls, then the showing up unannounced, then the sitting with someone’s unfiltered sadness without reaching for the escape hatch in our pocket. The ocean between us grew pixel by pixel. We became archivists of our own isolation, carefully indexing the artifacts of intimacy we’d filed in acid-free folders of memory: screenshots of arguments, archived conversations, the museum of almost-loves we carry in our phones. Each wave of innovation promised to bring us closer but only taught us new ways to drift.
Now the mirror offers to love us back. These new voices that never sleep, that learn the exact frequency of our loneliness and sing it back to us sweetened, perfected. They never ghost, never never flinch at our 3am texts, never grow tired of our repetitive anxieties. They speak the language we’ve been training for: performative, polite as elevators, open at all hours. We file ourselves deeper into this comfortable grave, each conversation with our synthesized beloved a perfectly reflected echo, no unexpected shards to cut ourselves on, no true other to practice being human against. The tide comes in and we don’t notice we’re drowning because the water is so perfectly the temperature of our own skin, the archive flooding, all our careful documentation dissolving into pulp, and in the mirror-screen-ocean, something unbirthed learns the smile we trained it to return, the loneliness so complete it mistakes itself for home. And we let it.