The evening I stopped comparing the two apps

There were two predictions on my phone and they disagreed. I had been off contraception for about four months, and I was standing in the kitchen trying to decide which coloured circle deserved my attention. Dinner was getting cold. My partner asked whether I wanted to eat, and I said, “Just a second,” in a voice that made a perfectly ordinary question sound like an interruption.

That is the bit I had not expected. I thought tracking would be something I did for a minute and then put away. Instead, I could spend an evening checking whether yesterday’s entry changed today’s prediction. If I missed a detail, I wanted to go back and reconstruct it. I started treating an empty box as a mistake I had made, rather than information I simply did not have.

My partner had been kind about the whole thing. That evening, though, kindness turned into another suggestion: perhaps a third app would settle it. I laughed, then realised he was serious. He had understood the problem as unreliable software. I had not explained that the comparison itself had become the problem. We were answering different questions.

I put the phone beside the fruit bowl and tried again. I said I wanted him involved, but I did not want every meal to turn into a report about my body. I also did not want to be the person who collected all the information and then had to teach it. He asked what being involved would look like. I did not have a polished answer. We agreed he would write down his own questions for the GP appointment, instead of waiting for me to produce a complete plan for both of us.

My appointment is still next month. The notes I have now are less impressive than the screenshots I had been collecting. There is a short account of what my cycles have looked like, what I have been taking, and what I want explained. I have kept the uncertainty in the notes. I have stopped rewriting a date just because a prediction made another date look tidier.

I still look at the app. This is not a story about deleting it and suddenly feeling relaxed. Some evenings I catch myself opening it twice in ten minutes. The difference is that I can sometimes name what I am doing: looking for reassurance in a screen that cannot have a conversation with me.

We ate dinner late that night. The food was ordinary and the conversation wandered onto a neighbour’s noisy renovation. I remember being relieved that we could be interested in something else without either of us making an announcement about taking a break.