Instantaneously after her demise bright while lights blinded Hailey. She knew she was somewhere she never been before. Her eyes adjusted and she found herself in a very simple room full of file cabinets, projectors and televisions. A desk with a lamp was positioned in the corner of the room right next to a giant projector screen. She thought it was the backroom of a library. One of those dusty old rooms filled with old newspapers and magazines that were rendered useless thanks to the internet.
She sat in a very comfortable chair; one that felt like she had been sitting in for years. The grooves and contours of the chair hugged Hailey giving her a sense of ease. Not knowing the full extent of what was happening to her the chair grounded her.
She looked down to see that she was wearing a simple polo shirt and khaki pants and clean white sneakers. This was an outfit that she wouldn’t be caught dead in. Hailey always wore the latest trends in fashion. She was so on top of fashion that on a semi-regular basis she would take photos of herself to post to her various social media sites. To wear something so simple almost caused her to have a panic attack.
A door from behind her swung open and a man wearing the same simple outfit entered. He carried a small TV tray that had a small salad and roll on it. He placed the tray in front of Hailey and pulled up a stool from underneath the desk. The salad was as plain and boring as the man in front of her.
Hailey considered herself a foodie even though she had never cracked open a cook book in her life. She took pictures of all of her meals at fancy restaurants. If she liked her meal then it would immediately get posted to her blog with a short description of how much she liked the meal. Meals she didn’t like she deleted the photo immediately in hopes to erase the memory forever.
“I’m sorry,” the man said, “you have passed away.”
As much as Hailey wanted to freak out she kept her composure. She reasoned that if this wasn’t real and that it was a dream she would eventually wake up. And if it was real, freaking out wouldn’t do much good. She just wanted someone to share this with so that she could be sure.
“Where am I then?” she asked.
“This is the record room. Every moment in your life has been recorded and can be found in these file cabinets.”
Hailey grew a small smile on her face.
“Any moment in your life can be put in that projector and you can relive that moment in your life. Press play and go towards the screen and you will be right back in that moment exactly how you remember it.”
Hailey jumped out of her seat knocking over the salad. She raced to read all of the file cabinets to see how they were ordered. Each cabinet had a year and each drawer on the cabinet had a month. Hailey found the cabinet that simply said on the top “2011.” She opened up the drawer that said April and filed through the photos. It was her birthday month and she just wanted to go back to a moment where she knew she had the most fun in her life. She rifled through the memories some got thrown on the floor others were shuffled back into the drawer. Concern grew over her face.
She snapped back to the man on the stool, “Where’s my birthday? Why isn’t it here?”
“You mean the birthday where you took photos the entire night? The birthday where you took a video every 10 seconds in order to capture the night forever?”
“Yeah! Where is it?”
“Well, all the memories that you wanted to ‘save’ on Earth with your videos and photos aren’t up here. Those all came from here. Every time you took a video or a photo it came from here and was lost somewhere on Earth. So you can only recreate the times that you didn’t take a photo or a video of the event.”
Hailey finally started to panic. She truly didn’t know where she was now.