THE DAY SHE DELETED THE APP

THE DAY SHE DELETED THE APP At first, she thought she was just tired. It had been one of those evenings when the light outside turned the colour of old paper, and she sat on the edge of her bed with her phone in her hand, scrolling without remembering anything she had seen. A wedding. Someone's new apartment. A girl she went to school with holding a bouquet beside a man whose name she didn't know. A plate of food. A baby. A graduation. Another wedding. She kept scrolling. Then, without much thought, she deleted the app. She expected to feel something. Relief, perhaps. Instead, she stared at the empty space on her screen. She locked her phone. A few minutes later, she unlocked it again. Her thumb moved automatically toward where the app had been. Nothing. She laughed quietly. "Oh." The next few days were strange. She discovered how often her hand reached for her phone without permission. In queues. In taxis. While eating. Just before sleeping. Immediately after waking. There was always something she had been about to check. Now there was nothing. At first, she replaced the app with other things. She read old messages. Checked her email. Rearranged the pictures in her gallery. Watched videos she didn't particularly care about. Then, slowly, those things became boring too. The silence remained. And inside that silence, she began noticing things. The cup with the chipped handle that she had been meaning to throw away. The way her mother's voice changed when she was tired. The neighbour's little boy who had grown tall enough to reach the gate. The crack in the ceiling above her bed. The book on her shelf she had bought two years ago and never finished. None of it was important. That was perhaps why she noticed it. One Saturday, she went out with an old friend. Her friend kept showing her pictures from a recent trip, turning the phone toward her after every few photographs. "This one got so many likes." She smiled. "It's nice." Her friend paused. "You haven't posted anything in forever." "I know." "Did something happen?" She looked at her friend. There were a dozen answers available, most of them easier than the truth. "Not really." Her friend waited. She looked outside. A woman was struggling to fold an umbrella near the entrance. A bus stopped at the traffic light, and someone inside was sleeping against the window. "I just got tired of watching everybody," she said. Her friend laughed. "Watching everybody do what?" She thought about it. "Live." They both laughed then, but she didn't. That night, she went through her old photographs. There were thousands. Her face appeared in most of them, carefully arranged in different versions of happiness. There were pictures she couldn't remember taking and places she couldn't remember enjoying. She stopped at one photograph. It was badly framed. She was sitting on the floor in her old room, laughing at something outside the camera. Her hair was untidy. One slipper was missing. There was no filter. She couldn't remember posting it. Maybe she hadn't. She looked at it for a long time. Then she noticed something. It was the only photograph in the entire folder where she didn't look like she was waiting for someone to see her. She closed the gallery. The following morning, she woke before her alarm. For a moment, still half-asleep, her hand moved toward the phone. Then stopped. Outside, someone was sweeping the compound. The broom scratched softly against the ground. She lay there listening. Nothing remarkable happened that morning. She made tea. Burnt the first slice of bread. Called her mother. Found the missing slipper under her bed. By noon, she had forgotten about the app entirely. And that, more than anything, unsettled her. Because she had spent so much time believing she would miss being seen. She hadn't considered that she might eventually stop missing the audience.

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