There is a corner of my apartment that exists only for calls. The lamp moved there two years ago for this exact purpose. The shelf was cleared and restocked with objects that look like the kind of objects a person like me would have: one plant, one book with its spine facing out, something ceramic that reads as intentional. The rest of the apartment doesn't look like that. Most of the rest of the apartment is various stages of disorder I don't have the energy to address. But the corner is ready. The corner is always ready.

I've started noticing when I'm on a call with someone and they haven't moved their background. I can read it now - the careful neutrality of a blank wall, the too-perfectly arranged bookshelf, the plant that never gets bigger. We are all performing an apartment, a room, a version of our lives in which the camera angle is the truth and what's behind the camera is something else. I know this about myself and yet the lamp stays where it is.

My mother called on video last week and I angled the camera slightly to include the plant. I am staging my living space for my mother. She has been in this apartment. She knows what it actually looks like. And still I moved the camera, still the plant appeared, still the performance ran automatically before I'd decided to perform.

What does it mean that the reflexive curation has gotten that deep? The corner has its own gravity now. I sit in front of it and the call begins and the version of my home that exists in others' minds is the clean version, the deliberate version, the corner. How much of where you live do you let people actually see?