Eight hours apart, one jar between the two of you

She's in Manila, eight hours ahead of you, and it's half past nine in the morning where you are and half past five in the evening where she is. The video call has been dropping every few minutes since you started it, her face freezing mid-sentence before the picture catches up. By the time you've said good morning and good evening in the same conversation, most of what you meant to say has already been said badly, over a connection that keeps cutting out. You end up typing it into her jar instead, the same evening, once the call has finally given up.

Memory Jar lets two people fill one jar from two separate phones. You open the app in London, she opens hers in Manila, and whatever either of you adds, a line about the call dropping, a photo of what's for dinner that night, lands in the same jar. Her nine o'clock and your one o'clock end up sitting one after another, dated by whichever phone the entry came from. Neither of you has to be online at the same time to add something; you only have to remember to before the day's gone.

Before she flew back after a visit last spring, she recorded a voice note of herself reading the last chapter of the book you'd been reading aloud to each other all week and dropped it into the jar before her flight, because she knew you'd want it more than she would once she was home. You've played it back at two in the morning more than once since. Starting the shared jar needed the paid plan on your side; joining cost her nothing, all she needed was the invite link you sent her.

You'll seal the jar eventually, maybe after a year together, maybe right before her next visit ends. Sealing turns everything you've both added into a single keepsake, and if you send her the link to open it, the part of that link after the "#" carries the key that opens it, and a browser never passes that part along to a server. Nobody at Memory Jar sees it, so what you've sealed stays unreadable to us too. If you ever want to close it off, you can turn sharing off from your side and the old link stops working, even for her.

The same jar works for a parent and child living an ocean apart, or two friends who talk mostly through a screen. Read more about how memories stay private, keeping a jar for a child, or a jar just for yourself.