Real intimacy means seeing beyond someone's polished version. So we remove the filters. We remove the softening effect from the edges of the mouth. We remove the captions, the credentials, the little blue symbols confirming that the person exists. We remove the face. Beneath it: another face, less certain. Beneath that: the frightened animal we have been training to pass for a person. My cat sits beside the screen. Her crossed eyes converge on a single point. For the first time, she sees us both. She sees the girls inside the machine. She sees the machine inside the photograph. She sees the moon inside the dark window where we've been looking for evidence of ourselves. Then she closes her eyes. The machine reecords this as a system failure. I record it as forgiveness. The tree reecords nothing. The tree has already remembered.
