The hallway, before I press the green thing

I am standing in the hallway of my own building with my phone out and I have not pressed call yet. The case is cracked along the bottom corner, that little spider line, and I keep noticing it because the crack catches the hallway light when I tilt the screen. Stupid thing to notice. But I notice it.

The reason I am out here and not in my apartment is that I wanted the sound of the place I live to not be the first thing a stranger hears. Behind my door there is a kitchen and somebody is doing something in it, a pan or a kettle, that small clatter that says a person lives here and is awake. I do not want that in the call. So I came into the hall where it is just the hum of the corridor and the faint elevator noise.

Lock screen first. This is the part I always forget I do until I am doing it. The notifications are stacked there like little open mouths. There is a message preview from my sister, just the first line, something about Sunday, and I think — anyone who can see my screen for two seconds can read that. I do not want a face I have never met reading my sister's first line about Sunday. So I clear them. Swipe, swipe. Not because the messages are secret, they are about Sunday, but because the previews belong to me and the moment I start a video they don't only belong to me anymore.

(There was one preview I really did not want visible and I will not even write what it was, which is the whole point, it was mine.)

The app opens and immediately the camera permission popup. Allow access to camera. I always sit on this one half a second longer than I need to. It is a yes, obviously it is a yes, you can't video chat with a closed camera, but the popup makes me look at what I am about to open. The little front lens above the cracked screen. I tilt the phone and I can see myself in the dark of it before the camera even turns on, a smear of my own face, and behind my face the hallway.

Then the location one. Allow access to location while using the app. This one I say no to without thinking and then think about it after. I don't know what a chat app needs my location for and the not-knowing is enough. While using the app is the gentlest version of the question and I still don't like it. No.

Here is a thing I only learned to look at recently. Before I turn the camera around I check what is behind me in the frame, but not the obvious behind-me, the small behind-me. There is a hallway mirror near the elevator, one of those cheap building mirrors, and if I stand wrong it catches the apartment doors over my shoulder. The numbers. 4-something. I move two steps left so the mirror only holds the blank wall. I am not paranoid, or maybe I am, but a number on a door is a number on a door and I would rather it not be in a video I cannot get back.

The delivery label. God. There is a package sitting by 412's door, not even mine, and the shipping label is face up and huge. My building does this, leaves things in the hall. When I framed the first preview the label was right there over my left shoulder, name and half an address, somebody else's name, and I had to turn ninety degrees to lose it. So now I am facing the fire door, which is ugly, plain grey, but it says nothing about anyone.

Audio menu, quickly, because I had a bluetooth thing happen once. I opened the sound settings to make sure it wasn't routing to some speaker and there in the list of devices was my headphones, named — I had named them, months ago, as a joke, with my actual name and a word I will not repeat — and it sat there in the menu plain as anything. Knot.chat was the app I was in that time and I remember thinking the app didn't do anything wrong, the name was just sitting in the operating system waiting for any audio menu to display it, my own joke from months ago waiting to introduce me. So now I look. I always look at what my devices are called before I let a menu show them.

Battery is at 14%. There's the warning, the little red slip-down. This matters more than it sounds. A call that dies at 14% in the middle is a call I didn't get to end on my own terms, the screen just goes black and the other person is left with whatever was last there. I want to be the one who closes things. So either I plug in or I keep it short. Tonight I keep it short, I decide, fourteen percent is a clock.

The back-swipe. I practice it almost. The exit gesture on this phone is a swipe from the left edge and I hate that it is so close to the gesture that does nothing, because in a moment where I want out, want out fast, I do not want to be fumbling at the edge of a cracked case trying to find the leave. I press my thumb against the edge once, dry run, feel where the crack is so my thumb knows. That sounds insane written down. It is just that the exit should be a reflex and not a search.

Screen recording indicator. I don't fully trust that I'd see it but I look at the top of the screen anyway, that little dot, the colored pill that means something is capturing. There isn't one. There rarely is. But the looking is part of it now, the same way you check the stove before bed even though you didn't cook.

What I am describing, if I step back, is not really settings. It is a small thing I do with my hands and my eyes in a hallway before I let a stranger into a rectangle that also contains my building, my sister's Sunday, my own face over a cracked screen, and the faint kitchen sound from behind a door that I walked out here specifically to leave behind.

Some nights I do all of this and then I just don't call. I stand there with the camera permission already granted, location already denied, mirror dodged, label out of frame, devices renamed, and I look at the green thing and I lock the phone instead and go back inside to the kitchen sound. That counts too, I think. That is also a setting. The one that isn't in the menu.

I went back in. The kettle was mine, it turned out. I never asked who I thought it was.