Composure

 The photo starts to become important over two weeks after it has been taken. You are in bed between your first alarm and your second alarm going off and going through the pictures on your phone. You let your eyes linger over it for a while, zooming in a little bit with your finger and thumb, to the part where the two faces are, then back out. You do not yet consciously think that this could be dangerous.

 At work, you hide your phone in your back pocket, and when you go to the bathroom you take your phone out and stare at the photo again. You do it multiple times hourly. In the late afternoon, you get a notification, the tall tree with an animated face pops up on the screen - You have viewed this image fifteen times - take some time to be outside today.

 You consider making the photo your phone background, to get around the act of opening it when you take it out of your pocket, but you don’t want anyone else to notice and ask what it is. At least, if you lock the screen with the button on the right hand side of the phone when you are finished looking at the photo, it is already open on the screen for when you unlock it again.

 You finally open up the app when you get home, pushing past the sick feeling in your stomach that dooms you to check it. The app plays the character of a tree which changes through the seasons very fast. Each day a leaf falls to give you a supportive message. It says you should be focusing on one thing at a time, so you stop looking at your phone whilst you watch TV. You cook bow-shaped pasta in total silence, without the radio on. One day, it tells you that it is good to be around other living things when you are sad, so you spend a Saturday morning inside the dark basement of the pet shop, watching the dwarf hamsters running about, and the tropical fish in their tanks. When somebody asks if you need any help, you leave.

 At one point, the app coaxes you into a very short lived running phase, where for eight days you run the same three mile route up to the park and around it and back, and don’t even drink when you get home. But you are still looking at the photo again when you get back. It is difficult to know which is better or worse; the ten times you would have looked at the photo sat at home, versus the longer you end up staring at it after you have been deprived. The ice outside ends your running phase in the end.

 Sometimes, you leave your phone in the office when you go on your lunch break, or put it in your locker or your bag whilst you are sitting at your desk. When you get back to it, the photo is almost not much different in your visual memory than it is on the screen. Memory is not opaque, or fully see-through, but translucent. That is, when you close your eyes or stare blankly somewhere in the office, you can see the photo almost as it is when you look at it on your phone. There are the two bodies and faces at the centre, only against the blacks and night time blues that seem to make up the background of anything in your mind, instead of the physical background of the real thing. When you are sure nobody is looking, you quickly email it to yourself so that you can open it on the work computer, but in the end you don’t dare.

 You get another notification. You have exceeded the number of times you can view this image today! Put down your phone and try to spend some time drawing.

 By night in bed, your heart twangs to look at it but it’s there in your eyes when you shut them, somehow closer to the evermore malleable memory of being that person in the photo than when you look at the photo itself. Here are what the other four senses are like, remember them, here is what touch is like, here is what skin was like. You think about waiting up until midnight to have one last look, when the clock will have reset on the restrictions on your phone for the day, but instead you fall asleep hopelessly re-constructing co-existing colours and those delusions of old world tenderness, over and over.

 The next day you save up your views, trying to remember how many you are limited to per day. How many times did you look at the photo yesterday before you reached your limit? Ten? Twenty? Will the fact that you exceeded the limit yesterday mean your allowance decreases the next day? Does it increase? Or maybe it is measured by viewing time rather than per view, and perhaps you could continue to open the photo to look at it in half second snaps, bright flashes to bring it back to you. You were drunk when you downloaded the app.

 You cannot type these questions into the search engine at work in case somebody sees you, or worse, in case someone were to check your history. You think there might be a way to casually ask the girls that sit next to you if they have used the app before, if they know about this function, but they feel otherly and unrelatable today more than ever.

When you get home, you google the name of the app and ‘customer service phone’. It takes you to the website, which is green, the same background of fallen leaves. There is a form that you can submit but there is no phone number or even live chat facility.

 Eventually, you find a page on a forum, where someone has asked your exact question and a group of other users have answered it.

 There is a post by a man from Arizona who has a five star frequent poster rating.

 ‘I have given up cocaine, video games, smoking, and drinking. Smoking was the hardest. Time-Span really helped me when my wife left. I gave the app deleting permissions based on my viewing behaviour. Ultimately, it helped heal me, but know that this is IRREVERSIBLE and loads of times I tried to contact the site but once you’ve ticked that box, you know there’s no way of going back. I’d say if you’ve set the limit, you did it for yourself and accept this. You’ll be okay in the end.’

 You are sparing with views then, a few in the morning, a total self-imposed ban in the early afternoon then one long period of staring at it before you go home. You open it when you get back, on the laptop, but the large screen makes it look weird, granier, much too big and imposing. You know very well that the views register to your data storage account on all devices, not just your phone. The colours in the photo; reddish skin and blue t-shirt, are slightly different on this screen, the images not small enough. You can zoom in but not the same way as you can on your phone, just squeezing softly with your forefinger and thumb, instead you have to zoom in using the keys which makes it bigger much too suddenly. The whole thing is embarrassing.

 You get another warning when you are looking at the photo while you’re waiting for the train to work the next morning.. ! - you have looked at this image 500 times this week. Please be mindful of internet usage. Then below there is a link to one of the app’s support pages, where the link to click on is already purple from use.

 You are not even enjoying looking at the photo anymore yet you panic. You look around at the other people on the platform to see if anyone is looking over your shoulder at your phone screen, or if they’ve seen your face, or worse, your face in the photograph and your face now. But none of the other three people there seem to have noticed it, one woman is reading, the other two are on their phones as well.

 The train comes and you get on it. You shut your eyes on the journey and picture the photo in your head, bits of it, the way the colours are changed, and you can’t tell that his skin condition had flared up that day on his arm, which is around you, and the way that you yourself are squinting. There are the boats in the background of which there are four. There is the woman in glasses who is having her own photo taken on the bridge in front of the view, unknowingly in the background of yours, who you are able to remember had a German accent but spoke to the person she was with in English, and where is that image, and how many times has she looked at it, and was she alone or did she know its photographer, and have they looked at it since, and what is the timescale on which it will take until they are gone from each other or will it be never?

 You wish there was more of it or other versions, changes in the composition, if only a few that were taken several seconds apart to indicate movement. You wish that you could picture the scene with your head and face in just a slightly different position in it, so that it is no longer stagnant.

 You know that there is nothing new to find in the photograph. That night, you open a dating app. You realise you have been looking at the photo so much that it feels strange to be so involved with another activity that involves looking at so many images that aren’t that one - man in suit, man with tennis racket, boys in line of other boys holding bottles. You drink vodka which you mix with diet lemonade while you scroll - man holding small Vietnamese baby, man in ski suit, man playing a DJ set on some decks in blue light, face concealed.

 You invite one of them over. For two hours you give in to reality in a way you have not for a very long time. You open the door and ask if he wants some of the vodka, let him ask questions about the stuff on your shelves, let him go down on you, let him put his fingers around your throat.

 He leaves before you go to sleep and you are drinking the rest of the vodka again and crying. You cry loud sobs that are either noises for solo crying or quite the opposite. They almost become performative, like how you’ve read cats only make noises to mimic the cries of human babies and attract a carer. Nobody is really coming.

 In bed, you reach for your phone, open the photograph and you look at it. You whisper a thank you to somewhere because already it feels like brand new material, exciting again as if you have never seen it before. All that you had to do to get this feeling back was something horrible.

 You open it on your phone and make another loud sobbing noise, almost forcibly like pressing your finger into the navel of a bruise. You look at the photo holding sternly in your head the concept that the person in the photo is gone and the other person in the photo (you) is also mostly gone and here you are, almost enjoying it.

 There are the four boats, did you even look at them at the time, count them like you have so many times since? Probably, no, because they were behind you, what you look at is the camera (you) and he is looking at the camera too (you, now.). The German woman with the glasses, even, feels like a character from a book or a famous person. You love her too, you think.

 You must have gone to sleep and then the next day you ring in sick, very dry-mouthed and hungover. You go back to sleep and you wake six hours later. You are in the pits. When you scroll to open the photo and place your thumb on the place it is in the folder, an error message appears. We’ve removed this photo from your device according to the restrictions you set for yourself on 17th September. Well done for sticking to your goals.

 You do not even cry at first, even that has hit its limit. You place the phone next to your head face down and for a long time just lie there, as if to touch it is to admit what has happened and as if to lie with your eyes shut is to go nowhere and have nothing happen.

 But by the end of the day you are riding the train back from town with a bag of things from the DIY store.

 You haven’t done any physical painting in years, and whilst you etch out the outline of the slow curve of the bridge, the place where the river is and your own head across the back wall you are thinking of how you will use yellow and tones of black to mix the hue of the green boat just right. The mural will take up the whole back wall of your flat. Your love is as big as a room. Your love isn’t going anywhere.

Lizzie Hudson is a Goldsmiths graduate with a degree in English with Creative Writing, and was one of the Northern Short Story Festival's supported writers for 2019. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications such as Strix, Litro, Riggwelter and Newcon’s Best of British Fantasy anthology. She is currently based in Leeds.

Louise Evans is a graphic designer and illustrator living in Bristol. She is interested in socio- linguistic history and the physicality of books. She does design for The Grapevine.