Hippo

The two college students were the only ones on the path. They were walking back to Serena’s dorm. The only sounds around them were the buzzing of the streetlamps and the scuffing of their shoes on the pavement. They had been embroiled in a discussion about their classes and professors, until the silence of the evening suddenly washed over them, gently hushing their voices. Jake noticed that they were walking very closely together now, and his heart fluttered. He stole a glance at her face. It was a face that he had known since they were in middle school, but for the first time, he got a glimpse of the adult woman she was becoming. The streetlight contoured her face, showing its sharpness. Her eyes were large and shrewd. The tip of her nose and the tips of her fingers were rose-tinted from the cold. He glanced down at her fingers, but didn’t hold them. He wanted to desperately, but he couldn’t. Serena put her hands in the pockets of her bomber jacket and looked dreamily at the gray twilight infront of them.

There was a rock in their path. Now, she is going to kick it, he thought, and she did. It caught a bit of air before skidding off the path into the damp grass. They laughed at their own naivety. Her dorm building was now in view. He knew her dorm window from the potted plants on her windowsill. They stepped onto a dirt path, away from the streetlamps.

“Thanks for walking me back, Jake.”

“No problem at all.”

They both shuffled their feet awkwardly.

“I had a really good time tonight.”

“Me too, Serena.”

The words floated out of his throat, and he had no control over them.

They faced eachother in silence for a moment and her eyes softened. She parted her lips, and looked like she wanted to speak, but couldn’t. They were standing so close that he heard the smack of her lips parting, like she was chewing gum. Even in the dim twilight, he could see that she was blushing.Here it comes, he thought.

She didn’t kiss him, and he didn’t kiss her. Rather, they came together in one movement, as a person faces their reflection in the mirror. He closed his eyes as their lips found eachother’s warmth in the cold.

He wanted to squeeze her hands tighter, but he couldn’t. He wanted to breathe in deeper as he kissed her, but he couldn’t.

Still, this is enough, he thought. It was enough for him to hold the nape of her neck and the small of her back as she relaxed into their kiss. He would do anything to have that again.

Suddenly she disappeared from his arms. His hands no longer felt cold. The dorm building disappeared and the darkness faded. The world around him was stark white.

His steps made no sound as he walked towards the holographic message undulating before him.

You’re out of memory credits!

Recharge your balance

Jake pulled off his headset. He was lying on his bed in his studio apartment. His phone and headset lay next to him. He closed Hippo, a virtual reality app that allows its users to visit their own memories, named after the hippocampus.

A different ex, after Serena, had seen the app icon on his phone. He was showing her a video on his phone. When he exited the app she saw it. A cursive M on a purple background. It was distinct. Unmistakable. Her smile disappeared. Her face was pensive and strangely aloof. He couldn’t lie his way out of that one. Not with success, though he tried. He told her a story about a sister who passed away. He never told her because, well, he just didn’t want her to feel bad for him.

She narrowed her eyes at him incredulously, and under her fiery gaze, his lies were burnt up into tiny flakes of paper and dissipated into the air. Everyone knows what Hippo is really used for. For a long while, they sat in silence. His phone was unlocked. If she really wanted to, she could open it and see how much money he spent on it. She could see how many times he told her she was going to bed, just to spend hours on the app. Finally, she shifted her weight away from him. The sound of her jeans sinking into the couch broke the silence. She promised not to tell anyone why they were breaking up before she left. He made no effort to stop her. He didn’t even look at her as her doc martens knocked on the vinyl floor. She joked that he could use his Hippo account if he ever wanted to see her again. He didn’t reply. The door swung open and thumped shut, and in that short second, their relationship was over. The spare toothbrush he had gotten for her stood in its holder. She was wearing one of his favorite flannels. He decided she could have it. One of her vinyls was still in his record player, but she never reached out to get it back. They never spoke again.

As a reflex, he opened instagram. At the top of his search history was Serena’s. The feed that popped up he had also nearly committed to memory.

At the bottom was the first picture she ever posted. Her hair was dyed black with bangs that swooped to the side. Her purple phone case balanced on her slender fingers. Her face was scrunched up like she was pouting. She was wearing the same bomber jacket that she had worn the night of their first kiss. He wondered if she still had it, or if she had gotten rid of it the same way she had gotten rid of him. This picture was taken back when they were still in high school, back when they were just friends that shared classes who were applying to the same college. The day she posted that picture, they had talked on the phone for 3 hours. He had fallen asleep with his phone on his pillow with a dead battery.

Further to the top of her feed was a picture of her college graduation. A gold sash draped over her shoulders. She was in a strapless baby pink dress. Her hair was light brown, and she had ditched the side bangs for a middle part. That day, they saw eachother on campus. He was heading towards the library, and she was coming back from it, getting her pictures taken on the steps. She was laughing with two of her friends. When they made eye contact, they stopped talking for a moment. They all tried not to look at eachother, which would be an acknowledgement their discomfort. Jake took cumbersome steps in her direction as he fought against the knots in his stomach and the heat in his throat. They walked past eachother and she waved, smiling at him in acknowledgement, without teeth. He strained to raise his hand in response. His pulse pounding in his wrist. Once they were past eachother, he saw the trio in the reflection in the glass library doors. One of her friend’s was whispering in her ear. That was the last time they saw eachother in person.

There used to be pictures of the two of them on her instagram feed, but she had long taken them down. Those same pictures had lingered on his camera roll until his post-Serena ex found them. He told her he had forgotten to delete them. That lie was not well received, but it had ultimately worked.

The most recent picture Serena had posted was with her new boyfriend. According to the caption, they had gone to Mexico together. In the picture, she smiled with her hand on her hip. He had his arm around her, casually. Jake thought it was too casual, like he had no idea how lucky he was to have her. Jake tapped the screen to see his username. When he went to his profile, a gray padlock showed on his screen. His profile was private. He opened his direct messages with Serena. He had wished her happy birthday 4 months earlier. The day after her birthday, at 10:38AM, she replied with “thanks!”

A singular word was all she could give him. He wondered if that was truly all she had to say. So few words had passed between them over the past three years, and it pained him. He never wanted them to become strangers. He stared at the word “thanks,” reading it over and over in her voice.

“Thanks!”

Serena took the paper cup from him, the string from the teabag fluttering in the breeze. She clasped her hands around it to warm her hands. They were sitting at an iron-wrought circle table. He set his own drink down. She set down the cup and her fingers fluttered across her laptop keyboard, her eyes were fixed to the screen.

He watched the way her eyes moved quickly across the screen. She glanced up at him, “what?”

“What do you mean?”

“You look upset.”

“I’m not, I just thought we were going to get to hang out.”

“We are hanging out,” she returned to her screen. Jake looked around at the people around them. There were couples that were holding hands and making eye contact. To an outside observer, Jake and Serena just looked like friends studying together.

“How am I supposed to talk to you when you’re looking at your laptop?” The fluttering of the keys stopped, but she did not look up at him from her screen.

Her voice was low and dry. “I told you Jake, I have a test tomorrow. I’m making time for you, isn’t that what you wanted?” She didn’t sound angry. She sounded distant, like he was at the bottom of a well, and her echoes were barely reaching him.

“No, you’re not making time for me, I’m watching you study.”

She sighed and slammed her laptop shut. Some onlookers turned at the sound.

“I can’t do this. I told you, I have a test tomorrow. I’m going home. Thanks for the drink.”

“Wait!”

He grabbed her and leaned in to kiss her. She was already pulling away from him. She gave him a quick peck, the kind you give a relative whose dentures you can smell.

“I love you”

“I love you too,” she replied as she yanked her hand away.

She slung her backpack behind her and marched away in the direction of her apartment. The world around him faded. The people watching, the tables and chairs, all he saw was Serena, and the cup of tea she had left on the table.

That was the last time he had kissed her. Even without opening Hippo, he knew that day well. When he first signed up for the service, he had tried searching through his painful memories for what went wrong between them. A part of him still believed that if he discovered that, he could make amends with her.

Jake opened Hippo and reloaded his balance. Just to see your own memories was expensive enough. Each additional sense was another $50 per minute. The more a memory excited the nervous system, the more expensive it was to visit. The grand total for Jake visiting his first kiss with Serena was more than most people could afford. For Jake, it was a small expense with his salary. He had no kids and lived in a sparsely furnished studio apartment. There were few other things he cared to spend money on. He scrolled through his memory log. When he saw the image of Serena’s profile under the streetlight, he tapped the screen and waited for the memory to load. He started to pull his headset on when an error message popped up on his screen.

You have visited this memory for the maximum number of 50 times!

Please pick a different memory

His heart thumped and his skin became hot. His stomach turned into a wasp’s nest. He read the words over and over. Please pick a different memory.

He remembered the tutorial telling him there was a maximum amount of times he could visit a singular moment in time. It was a safety precaution to prevent psychosis. When the app first launched, there had been suicides, followed by lawsuits. The app was almost shut down, but Hippo was desperate to make money, and its customers were desperate for its services. What resulted was that compromise. Any time he wanted, he could check his history and see how many times he visited different memories, but he hadn’t been keeping track. He had no idea he would hit it so quickly.

He threw his headset across the room and pounded his fits into his mattress. The headset smacked against the drywall and made a dent, like a scooped out piece of ice cream. He didn’t notice. He pulled a pillow over his face and squeezed his eyes shut.

If he couldn’t enter the memory through the app, then his own memory would do just fine. He had visited it enough times. Fifty times had to be enough to know it well. He could see the walking path. He could see Serena’s face glowing under the streetlamps. He could see her bomber jacket and her jet black hair. He saw the rock skid off the path. Her dorm building was undetailed, but he could see its vague shape. The only detail was the plants in Serena’s window. He thought of them staring at eachother, and the moment her lips parted. He would never know what she intended to say at that moment. He had never asked her, and it was too late to ask her now. I had a great time tonight. Me too Serena. Me too Serena. Me too Serena.

He pulled his fist to his face and kissed it as hard as he could. He pulled his pillow closer to him and squeezed it like a sponge. His pillow was wet with tears. Suddenly a scream erupted from him as he threw the pillow away from him. It thumped at the foot of his bed. He breathed heavily and stared blankly. Like that day at the cafe, the world disappeared around him. He felt immobilized, like he was at the bottom of that well again. He sat there for what could have been hours, he wasn’t sure. When he finally recovered some composure, the digital clock at his bedside flickered as the time changed to 3:00AM. He snapped off light switch and sank. He sank into his mattress. He sank into the water at the bottom of the well. He was tired of treading water, and he couldn’t hear the echoes of Serena’s voice anymore. He heaved with sobs until he had fully exhausted himself, and fell into a fitful sleep.