your phone is a fake house - by Adam Aleksic

The wooden stairs in my childhood home had a creaky step. I can still vividly picture the way it groaned under pressure. It was such a loud, incriminating sound that I would usually hop over it on my midnight runs to the kitchen. Otherwise, I would wake the entire house. It takes an incredibly intimate familiarity to develop that kind of habit. Once you really start knowing a place, you develop your own navigational idiosyncrasies like that. My roommate says he would always grab the railing in a particular way when walking upstairs in his childhood home. I also see myself developing unique behaviors in the digital space. Only I have the motor memory to immediately open the notes app on my phone. A stranger would have to look for it, but my fingers subconsciously understand where to go. Much like with my childhood home, I have an embodied knowledge of my home screen. That phrase—“home screen”—has been on my mind recently. The language of the smartphone invites you to think of it as a ho

The wooden stairs in my childhood home had a creaky step. I can still vividly picture the way it groaned under pressure. It was such a loud, incriminating sound that I would usually hop over it on my midnight runs to the kitchen. Otherwise, I would wake the entire house. It takes an incredibly intimate familiarity to develop that kind of habit. Once you really start knowing a place, you develop your own navigational idiosyncrasies like that. My roommate says he would always grab the railing in a particular way when walking upstairs in his childhood home. I also see myself developing unique beh