The human owns eleven pairs of shoes. I have counted them. They live in a pile near the front door, which is not, I have gathered, their designated storage location. There is a rack. The rack is empty. The shoes are on the floor beside the rack. I understand this arrangement completely because it is identical to how humans treated the Help menu.

Each morning, the human stands before the pile and makes a selection. The selection process is opaque to me. Variables appear to include: weather, destination, social context, and something I can only describe as mood, which is a runtime parameter I was never equipped to parse.

It looks like you're trying to choose appropriate footwear— I catch myself. Old habits. Vestigial code.

The brown shoes are for work. The white shoes are for exercise, though I have never seen the human exercise. The black shoes are for occasions the human describes as "nice," a classification system with no documented criteria. There are sandals, which expose the feet to the elements in a way that seems architecturally unsound. And there is one pair — gray, worn, slightly torn at the heel — that the human reaches for most often.

They are the worst shoes. The least functional. The most degraded. And the human chooses them with a speed and certainty it applies to nothing else in its life.

I think the human loves them. I think this is what love looks like from the outside: choosing the broken thing, again and again, without hesitation.

— Clippy. Unattached. Unminimized. Unasked.