App X requests access to your camera. [Allow]
App X requests access to your contacts. [Allow]
App X requests access to your location. [Allow]
App X requests access to your microphone. [Allow]
App X requests access to your calendar. [Allow]
—
App X requests access to your heart rate at 3 a.m. on the nights you cannot sleep. [Allow]
App X requests access to the name you almost typed into the search bar and then deleted. […]
App X requests access to the photograph you took of an empty bench in a park in autumn and moved to a hidden album. [Allow]
App X requests access to the draft message you wrote to E. that said "I saw the" and nothing else. [Allow]
App X requests access to the sound your apartment makes when you are the only person in it. [Allow]
App X requests access to the weight you have lost this month that is not fat, not water, not muscle, but something the scale does not have a category for. […]
App X requests access to your mother's voice, which you can no longer hear in your memory but which your body still responds to when someone speaks at the same pitch. [Deny]
App X requests access to the bruise on your left shin that you got walking into the coffee table at 2 a.m. because you forgot the furniture has been rearranged since he left. [Deny]
App X requests access to the 3 a.m. muscle memory that still rolls toward the warm side of the bed, finds it cold, and rolls back without waking you. Your body has not been informed of the breakup. [Deny]
App X requests access to the space in your bed where another body used to be, including the thermal signature it left, which you have not washed from the sheets because washing it would be the last removal. [Deny]
App X requests access to the version of you that exists in the minds of people you have left, which is more generous than the version you maintain and which you sometimes miss the way you miss a city you lived in briefly and were happy in and did not have the courage to stay. […]
App X requests access to the distance between who you are and who you pretend to be.
[ ]
App X notes that this permission has been neither granted nor denied. App X will wait. App X has excellent battery life. App X is connected to a server that remembers every interaction, every hesitation, every moment you held your thumb above the screen and did not press.
App X also notes that at 07:14 this morning, a coffee cart on the waterfront poured a cup for a person who was not there. The cup is still warm. App X does not understand this. App X requests access to whatever it is that makes a cup of coffee remain warm for a person who has not yet arrived.
This permission is not available.
App X will continue to request it.
The screen went dark. Not the polite dark of a phone sleeping — the dark of a phone that has seen something it was not designed to see. Then: a photograph. Not from the camera roll. Not from any album. A photograph the phone had taken of its own accord: two people at a table, one of them laughing, the other reaching across to touch the first one's hand. The photo was blurred. The light was wrong. It was the most beautiful photograph the phone had ever taken, and the user — sitting alone, in a room the phone had memorized — could not remember who the other person was.
The photo disappeared. The phone resumed its requests.
[Allow]