She filled out her first dating profile in a frenzied whirl, half-drunk on the yet-undigested news that her ex had brought someone with him to Thanksgiving that year.
For a photo, she uploaded the professional headshot that was on the “Meet Our Team!” page of her work’s website, then quickly removed it, fearing these unknown, savage internet men could reverse-image search their way to learning every private facet of her life. She snapped a brand-new—and thus unsearchable—photo of herself standing and staring into her hallway mirror. She intended a smile, but only captured once its bloom had faded, her expression already wilting into its usual wrinkle of woe.
That first night, one man messaged her. She felt dangerous and desirable when she saw the alluring dot of the notification, red like a woman’s sex. The man’s name was Alan and all of the photos on his profile were selfies taken in his car.
hi, he messaged.
She stared at the little text bubble, and it was invigorating but then immediately she felt unsafe—who was this guy, this stranger? Why had she purposefully exposed herself to an unvetted man who would inevitably just bring her hurt? Then that initial, sharp instinct towards self-preservation withered and underneath it she just felt foolish.
She closed the app, then reopened it and in one decisive press of her finger, deleted her profile. She closed the app again and uninstalled it from her phone. Who was she kidding? Who would want to date her? Before her marriage had ended, back in their courtship’s tender beginning, she had only become her husband’s pre-ex wife by dint of them both having been young and stupid. There was no way anyone else would ever want her, not now. There was no possibility that Alan could actually like her. He probably just messaged every profile he stumbled across. He probably was a bot.
She went to work the next day and wore a high-collared, conservative blouse, like the one in her picture on the website, that hid any suggestion her body could be engaged in something as unprofessional as romance. She thought of emails and meetings and spreadsheets—but then, in the car on her commute home, suddenly she thought of Alan and his selfies. Where had he been driving to? His photos had been taken on different days, evidenced by his different outfits, but his expression was always the same. It was a stern, perceptive look; a look like he was really seeing her, even through the screen of her phone. His was a gaze that traversed time, traveling via the power vested upon it by the holy quintology of 5G mobile data, staring up and out of the phone screen and then deep within her. His was a look that trespassed upon the secret caverns of her mind, witnessing the heavy list of every bad thing she wished she could’ve undone. His seeing was her immaculate confession, and when his gaze at last averted from her hidden shames, she would finally be granted the freedom to forget them.
That night she dreamt of Alan. They were in his car. He turned his face towards hers. They locked eyes. “Hi,” he said.
She found herself thinking of Alan every time she drove her car. “Hi,” she started saying when she turned the ignition, when she buckled her seatbelt, when she stopped at a red light. “Hi.” It was like their secret code word, hers and Alan’s, the verbal key to unlock their world.
Soon, her dreams of Alan became more complex. They’d drive around a dream city, for hours. She’d beg Alan to speak to her, but now he was always silent and distant. She’d plead with him to only just say their private word, to just say, “Hi.” He would instead stop the car, mutely turn towards her beside him, and stare. The stare was awful; it swallowed her in its thick blackness. And then, after a while, he would turn away and resume driving the city’s streets, and yet she would still feel trapped in his darkness.
In the dreams, in the unspoken contextual fabric that swaddled them, it became fact that she and Alan lived in this car, and maybe always had. They were married, in the dreams. She would scream and curse at him to tell her where they were going, what unreachable place was their final destination, but of course he didn’t speak; in the dreams it had been years since she had heard his voice, since he had whispered what had become her pet name, her sobriquet: Hi, hi, hi. Hi had been prayer and dirty talk all in one syllable and now he had taken it away. He wouldn’t even look at her anymore, kept his unblinking eyes trained on the endless road ahead. She started weeping, in the dreams, a heavy, sticky kind of weeping that invaded her whole being like sickness.
Even when awake, she now couldn’t speak their private word without sobbing, even just in greeting to her colleagues. Soon just the sight of her own car brought her to tears, and soon enough, everything else did, too: the couch in her living room where she and Alan would never lounge together on lazy weekends; the trashcan in her kitchen that he would never chivalrously empty before even being asked; the spot on her desk at work where his picture would never sit, declaring their love to the world.
Her coworker caught her weeping in the bathroom, and she didn’t have words to express what she was going through.
“Alan,” was all she could croak through the stall door, before being overcome by another sob.
“Ah, breakup,” the coworker said knowingly, and silently exited the room.
Then, abruptly, the Alan dreams stopped. She still dreamt at night, but she’d returned to her usual carousel of familiar stress dreams: the one where she was back in high school; the room full of spiders; being pulled by a wave out into the ocean with no way back to shore. In the mornings after these dreams, she somehow felt more tired than she had the night before. Throughout her days she now yawned as much as she had been sobbing. Her eyes were perpetually puffy and bloodshot but it was indiscernible whether it was from these restless nights or just the cold blanket of lingering despair.
And then, early one morning, she woke herself up. The well-trodden high school dream had whirred into place: she was a student but she was her same adult age. Confused, she walked up and down the school’s labyrinthian halls. In this recurrent nightmare, she never knew her class schedule and she could never find the administrative office—the correct corridor was always locked, or she made the wrong turn and ended up back where she had begun—and she was overwhelmed by the pervasive suspicion that she wasn’t even supposed to be there. As always when she had the high school dream, a feeling of stress and frustration and powerlessness swelled within her. But then—in an unprecedented act of REM-cycle defiance, she simply thought, “No.” The dream ended. Her eyes opened. Somehow, her desperation had instinctively manifested the ability to dream lucidly.
She started waking herself immediately if the wrong kind of dream began. She’d wake up five, six times a night. Just before rousing herself, she’d first whisper, “Hi,” as a last-ditch attempt to ferret out if Alan existed in that same dream universe.
She woke herself from spiders and water and reenacted memories of her marriage failing, until finally, finally, she had a dream in which she was back in the city, their city, her and Alan’s city. Nervous, hopeful, and scared to feel something as perishable as hope, she whispered, “Hi,” out into the empty city streets. It rang true. She could feel the whole block vibrating—she had uttered the key and the lock was somewhere in this dream landscape. Alan was somewhere, here in this dream. She had to find him.
She ceased waking herself from her other dreams. Instead, she discovered that with an invocation of her nascent powers of lucidity, she could simply leave her initial dream surroundings and go from there to the city. All she had to do was exit the high school, walk out of the arachnids’ nest, swim back from the shore. Once she arrived in their precious metropolis, she roamed its streets, calling, “Hi.” Her trembling voice’s echo reverberating back was her beacon, her compass, telling her where to turn next. “Hi, hi, hi, hi.” Soon she did not even have to say it, would just hold the unspoken word in her mind and it would guide her, through the dream streets, through offices and gardens and shopping malls. She started going to sleep as soon as she got home each evening, in order to grant herself the maximum time in which to explore the city. She started sleeping on her breaks at work, curled up under her desk or on the back seat of her car. And then she started sleeping in, and not even going to work at all.
She wandered the dream city for dream years, saw dream seasons change, saw dream buildings crumble, saw dream snow and dream sleet and dream storm. She devoutly followed the beacon wherever it led her. It warmed her with its soft internal glow until at last it burned bright and clear and she knew he was close, she could feel him.
And then she saw it: his car, driving towards her, out of the mouth of a tunnel several blocks away.
The beacon burned brighter and brighter inside her, searing and hot. She ran towards the car, a run so fast it approached flight, only halting at the behest of a Do Not Walk sign’s demandingly authoritative red hand. She was so close. His car was stopped at the light on the other side of the intersection. Desperately she stared through the car’s windshield, but he didn’t notice her. She waved her hands and she flapped her arms and she jumped and she danced and then—and then he looked over. But—his face. The beacon inside her wavered and dimmed, and suddenly she was unsure if it had ever even been guiding her, if it had ever even warmed her with its light, if she was not just empty inside, suffused with her usual unrelenting darkness. His face—it was unfamiliar and uninviting, a cold, unexplored landscape. All at once she realized she could not remember if this is what he had looked like. If this man in this car in this dream city was even the Alan for whom she had been so desperately searching.
The light changed. The car drove through the intersection and then past her. She tried to call out their secret word, their signal, but she could say nothing at all, and then he was gone.
She woke without making herself. She rooted around her twisted bedsheets until she found her phone. She swiped past all of the email notifications and the texts and the missed calls. She reinstalled the dating app. She seamlessly clicked “forgot password,” opened her email and artfully ignored every message but the password reset link. She typed alanalanalan into the box, and then, after that was rejected for not being secure, alanALAN@1@n!
She had to create a new profile and this time she used her professional work photo. She was unperturbed, had no reservations about him reverse image-searching the details of her life—for Alan would soon be in that life: sweetly serenading her at happy hour karaoke; softly kissing her beneath mistletoe at the office Christmas party; candidly beaming at her beside him in a framed picture that so captured their immaculate happiness co-workers would involuntarily stop beside her desk to smile back at this photograph. “That’s the look of love,” they’d say.
For her bio, the only written section of the dating app profile which she could not leave blank, she just typed, “hi hi hi.” She clicked accept and then here she was, back in the portal connecting her to Alan’s gaze. She hungrily clicked on the button that said All Messages.
The inbox was empty.
She incredulously stared at the blank space on the screen that had once held hi, that had once held the world. After a while, the phone’s screen went black due to inactivity, and soon after that, her eyes closed, her vision went dark and she fell back into slumber. It was the ocean dream. From the shallows she could see the dream city blinking at her far in the distance—its skyscrapers and its overpasses, its churches and its penitentiaries—but she turned away from it, and she lay back on the surf with her arms outstretched, and she let herself drift out to sea.