My Feed, His Face

A love story written in pixels, refreshed in real time, never once consented to be mine.

You never arrive all at once.

You drip into my morning

like the blue light that finds me

before the sun does.

You’re there—

third square down, left side of the feed,

between an ad for weighted blankets

and a stranger’s brunch.

Your smile is tagged at 7:03 a.m.

by a woman who writes

“couldn’t survive without you”

and means it.

I double tap

like a polite guest at the window

of a house I will never enter.

Your life is a highlight reel,

mine is the buffering wheel.

You are wedding-party candid,

champagne-lit and laughing,

holding a microphone

like you were born mid–punch line.

The caption says:

“he always knows how to save the night,”

and I press my thumb to your face

like the screen is rosary glass,

each photo a bead I count

instead of sheep.

I know the square inch of your collarbones

better than I know my own reflection.

I know the slope of your nose by heart,

the way your cheeks rise—

small earthquakes beneath skin—

when someone else says something

that makes you happy.

I am an archivist of a love

you never applied to donate.

There is a timeline of us

that exists only in the ache

between thumb and screen.

Memories I was never inside of

line up in chronological cruelty:

your road trip to the canyon,

your niece on your shoulders,

your new apartment with the plant

you swear you’ll keep alive this time.

I am there in the negative space:

in the empty passenger seat,

in the hand not holding the toddler,

in the bare corner waiting for a second chair.

My devotion drafts itself

in unsent messages:

– “That shirt brings out your eyes.”

Delete.

– “I had a dream your car wouldn’t start.”

Delete.

– “I think I might love you.”

Delete, delete, delete.

The cursor blinks like a tiny siren

on the side of a road

you’re not driving down.

The algorithm has learned

how to feed me your life

as if it were a vitamin

I’m deficient in.

It serves your face

between news of wildfires

and war zones,

as though your laughter

is a counterweight

to catastrophe.

It is not mercy.

It is metric.

Still, I let it medicate me.

I scroll the way some people pray:

repetitive, desperate,

trusting a machine

to return the same miracle

again and again.

Every update is a tiny resurrection—

you, alive in yet another place

I will not touch.

Once, your story glitches.

A half-loaded video—

you, mid-turn,

eyes searching off screen.

For a moment, you are not curated.

Your face is caught between expressions:

something like worry,

something like wonder,

a human frame inside the loop.

I pause there.

Thirty seconds, ninety,

long enough for the app to ask

if I’m still watching.

I am.

I always am.

I screen-record the fragment

as if it were proof:

look, he doesn’t always belong

to the captions.

Sometimes he just exists,

unguarded, in the wild

of a weak connection.

I replay that stuttered second

like an old song nobody else remembers,

until even the glitch

learns to feel intentional.

My friends say:

“Just mute him.”

“Unfollow.”

“Start over.”

As if devotion were a switch

and not a sediment,

layers of quiet wanting

hardened into something

that looks almost like belief.

What they don’t see:

how the day arranges itself

around your possible appearance.

How I ration my longing

in ten-second increments,

waiting for your icon to glow.

They don’t know that you are

the clock I set my loneliness to.

Morning: check your new posts.

Afternoon: see who tagged you.

Evening: watch your stories expire

and call it closure.

Night: imagine your phone darkness

mirroring mine,

two screens turned face down

on separate nightstands,

our separate ceilings

equally blank.

Sometimes I try to remember

the first time your face

entered my feed.

It feels like trying to recall

the instant I crossed

from shallow end to deep water—

not the step, but the sudden absence

of ground.

Was it a friend of a friend’s tag?

A recommended follow?

Did I tap your profile by mistake

or was it always, somehow, on purpose?

Does it matter?

Every myth begins

with a casual glance

no one realizes

is about to become scripture.

In another life,

my devotion would have smelled

like your shirts drying in my hallway,

would have sounded

like your keys in my bowl,

would have learned the map

of your shoulders

from the inside of your sleep.

Instead, it is a digital rosary,

beads of borrowed images

rubbing my thumbs raw.

I worship in silence

on a platform screaming for noise.

I build a cathedral of “seen at 1:14 a.m.”

and “online 5 minutes ago,”

stained-glass hopes

out of green dots and grey text.

You never held the blueprints.

There are moments

I taste anger like metal.

At the company

that coded this craving

into an endless page.

At my own soft heart

for mistaking proximity

for promise.

At you—

not for living your life

beyond the borders of my hunger,

but for being so effortlessly vivid

in a world that keeps handing me

your after-images.

But mostly,

I am angry at the story

I keep ghost-writing:

Our almost.

Our someday.

Our if only.

Every time your face appears,

I turn the page

on a book you never agreed

to be written into.

Tonight, I do something radical,

which is to say:

I do nothing.

I leave your story bubbles unlit,

my thumb hovering,

a swimmer at the edge

of a familiar deep.

I set the phone face down

and let the silence

crawl out from under it.

It is heavier than I expect,

this quiet without you in it.

It has weight,

like a hand on my chest—

steady, unfamiliar.

In the dark,

my mind still projects your face

onto the ceiling’s blankness,

but the pixels are softer here,

less cruel.

I realize:

you were never the altar,

only the mirror.

All this unchosen devotion

has been orbiting

something with my name on it

the whole time.

The feed will update without me.

Your life will continue

in its beautifully staged frames.

And somewhere in the backlog

of my own neglected drafts,

there is a first photo of myself

I have yet to take

that doesn’t angle toward you

for validation.

I am learning

to scroll my way back

to the moment

before your face,

before the drip feed

of maybe.

I don’t unfollow.

I don’t block.

I just breathe,

and let the algorithm wonder

where I went.

For the first time,

my devotion

logs out.

And in the dim,

without a witness,

I begin the slow,

unglamorous practice

of choosing

myself.