A story · House of Mirrors
Screen Time, Tuesday
A short interactive story about picking the phone up to check one thing, and putting it down nineteen minutes later feeling worse than before. You choose what she does in those minutes; there are four possible endings.
It is 9:52 on a Tuesday and Zara picks up her phone to check one thing — a delivery update, nothing more — and by the time she looks up again it will be 10:11 and she will feel, without being able to say exactly why, distinctly worse than she did nineteen minutes ago.
9:52pm
Screen time: 1h 47m today
Your package has shipped
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The delivery update takes four seconds to read. It is, by any reasonable measure, the entire reason she picked the phone up. It is also, structurally, the least interesting thing on the screen — three other icons are sitting right next to it, each one a small closed door with something behind it, and her thumb is already moving toward one of them before she's finished reading about the package.
She knows, in the abstract, that this happens most nights. She could tell you, if you asked her cold, exactly what the phone does to her mood on average — she's noticed the pattern before, vaguely, the way you notice a stair you've tripped on twice without quite remembering to look down the third time.
Right now, at 9:52, none of that is quite live in her mind. What's live is the four seconds of relief that already arrived from checking the delivery, and the small, familiar itch underneath it that hasn't been satisfied yet — the itch that four seconds of a shipping update was never actually going to reach.
Her thumb lands on the second icon.