He never intended to take a picture, that much he was sure of, but he could not trust his mental snapshot to stick the moment in his permanent consciousness in the exact way he wanted. Occupying the student lounge’s entire couch, a girl lay with her eyes closed and laptop opened, the screen left playing a YouTube video of something important seeming, CNN or something like that. He puttered on with his work until the clock demanded his exit, and he shot the girl another glance. The slight glow casted on her face by the laptop screen had faded. She was asleep.

         His fingers moved with practiced, mechanical motion, deftly navigating from the lock screen to the camera app, positioning the thumb directly over the white circle tasked with cementing the moment.

         Click

         The brain’s synapses fired a barrage at the endocrine gland telling it, desperately, that we enjoyed that. The rush of pleasure washing over his body sent his moral subconscious into a panic, and just as the subconscious went to rouse the shame department of the cerebrum, another wave of pleasure quelled any chance of that. By the end of his next class, his hand had stopped shaking enough for him to look at the picture. He could not make out her curves from the swathe of her university sweatshirt; her breasts, his mind contained no memory of them, were no more than little reminders barely forcing the sweatshirt’s material upwards.  

         What the twelve million pixels of his phone’s camera delivered to him was her face. He zoomed in once, and his mind ran rampant creating stories trying to justify the reason for her sleeping. He increased the magnification to eight times and stared at her pores, the crinkle of her bottom lip, the way the bridge of her nostril melds into the skin, the purple flesh congealing beneath the thin flaps of her eyelids, the red mark left by an ingrown hair she had plucked out of her eyebrows, and the glistening sweat and oil illuminating her forehead. His fingers snapped at the phone’s border, and he gingerly tapped the floppy disk icon that appeared. The words SAVED TO DRIVE flashed on the screen. In three megabytes of space, he had captured her everything.