“If you could, would you travel back in time, or explore the future?”

When I was young, I always thought that that was one of the stupidest questions you could ask. It wasn’t because of the question’s evident impossibility to become true, but simply because there seemed to be a manifestly correct answer to it. “The future,” I would exclaim. And upon people’s curiosity as to my reason for such a prompt answer, I shrugged and responded, “I’ve already experienced the past—what point is there to experience what I’ve previously gone through?”

Granted, I was probably the age of six when I unwaveringly yelled out my wish to explore the future. I still believed in flying cars and hoverboards, and people adorned in avant-garde clothing, gliding across the streets, as the human population successfully settled in other celestial bodies. But it wasn’t just the myriads of films that delineated the inexplicable utilization of technology, and the ease and excitement it brings, that made me kick my feet in excitement for the future. Expectedly, as a child who had yet lived through much, it truly was the thought of aging that endlessly fascinated me. The anticipation of the kind of person I would be in middle school—in high school, and then as an adult, maybe pursuing a job as a movie director, applying red lipstick using my car’s rear mirror, and getting ready to marry my partner, made me feel giddy in the stomach. Oh, the wonders of adulthood, I would mumble dreamily. The future remained looking rather inviting.

I was hugely mistaken. Alas, I was only six when such imaginations dominated my head—self-awareness was yet to develop, as days basking in childish delight passed. It only took years later for me to gain consciousness, of emotions of ambiguity to click. At twelve, my first contact with a strong longing for the past came when I realized I was bigger than most girls in my class. I wished to reverse back time so I would eat less, so my thighs weren’t as big as they were—and I was only twelve. It breaks my heart now to think about twelve-year-old me who was ruminating about such thoughts; the realities of the world strike deeper than we remember, and our dissatisfaction with the present morphs into a longing for the past at an earlier stage in life than we might remember.

When middle school was coming to an end—which I thought of as the simple days—mere concerns about assignments and forgetting to receive my parents’ signature on a permission sheet expanded to complicated realistic realms of human relationships and the dreaded future. Talking behind people’s backs was normal, as new cliques were formed. While classmates discussed tutoring, PSATs, and their need to learn a new language, I stayed silent, avoiding thoughts about the looming responsibilities of high school. I want to be an architect or a movie director, I would confidently mumble, just to happily ignore the choices I would have to make to make said dreams come true. Drowning in my seat during algebra classes, I shivered just at the thought of the impending doom of becoming a high school student, then an adult, as a college student—the future didn’t seem so promising anymore when I realized I was responsible for my destiny. How inconvenient is that, I thought. I thought adulthood was something a lot cooler, like having an abundance of freedom to carry on any aspirations I hold. And by then, I was yelling my longing for the past every night.

Amidst responsibilities for the future, which I did not want to think much of, was a boy I was very close to. He was tall, with a broad figure, and wore a pair of semi-thick glasses. He had a scar on his cheek which he told me he got from his curious brother accidentally scratching him when he was still a newborn, and he was always sleepy, his head buried deep in his arms every morning before classes started. I had known him since the fifth grade, but we started to become closer around the sixth grade. He was a genuinely kind friend, who was fun to talk to, and he would tolerate all of my playful punches and unhinged remarks. My days at school were permeated by my interactions with him: I made fun of his basketball dribbles while he boisterously laughed at jokes we exchanged. I loved the mundanity I spent with him at school until one day, he confessed his feelings for me on the school rooftop. 

In the animated film, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006), Makoto, the teenage protagonist, is completely uncertain of her future, in blissful ignorance. When her friend, Kousuke, tosses Makoto a baseball and asks for her vision of the future, Makoto pretends to ruminate, just to exclaim, “A hotel tycoon! Or an oil tycoon!” Her days are a series of unlucky mundanity: a late bike ride to the school, a mini quiz she botched up, an accidental fire caused by herself in a cooking class, and a session of baseball with her friends Chiaki and Kousuke until she unexpectedly gains the power to travel time on the brink of her death. In the face of this newfound ability, Makoto does what every other teenager would do: she first returns to the day her sister steals her pudding before she does, and perfects every imperfection of her mundane routine. Gulping down the satisfaction of a perfect routine, Makoto boisterously laughs out, feeling purely invincible—she has won time.

Makoto’s sense of dominance over time, however, falls when an underclassman confesses to Kousuke. Although Makoto and Chiaki convey their confusion regarding Kousuke’s decision to turn down the underclassman’s feelings, Makoto confesses her relief to Chiaki. “Then we won't be able to play baseball anymore,” Makoto remarks. “l thought maybe the three of us would always be together.  Kousuke would tell us off for being late and you would tease me for not being able to catch the ball . . .” And amidst Makoto’s appreciation for the present, Chiaki, after a few nervous glances at Makoto, asks, “How about . . . you go out with me?” and Makoto’s blissful present is shattered, as a horrific revelation dawns upon her.

Watching Makoto stare at Chiaki in disbelief, I couldn’t help but blurt out a laugh in complete sympathy. On the day of my friend’s confession to me, I too was scared, uncertain, and wanted to run away. On the cold school rooftop, his affectionate words hung in the air as I stood in silence, unable to meet his gaze. I couldn’t look into his face as I stared off to the sky, my heart pounding, as we quietly left the rooftop, both in tacit agreement that said interaction never happened. Our relationship, which once was blissful and untroubled, morphed into awkward exchanges of asking for each other’s erasers, as our classmates whispered the state of our changed relationship. I wanted to go back to what we were to each other before the exchanges at the rooftop, but it was difficult to completely disregard what happened when the scenario at the rooftop replayed in my head. Why did he have to confess, I mumbled, staring at his profile on his messenger, and a now dry chatroom asking for textbook pages—what once was a series of blissful mundanity transformed into discomfort and a series of foreign emotions that shattered my comfort. Only if his confession never happened, only if I could turn back time so I didn’t head up to that rooftop with him.

Unlike myself, who was seemingly entrapped in a helpless limbo of awkward exchanges with my friend, Makoto reverses time to void Chiaki’s romantic confession to Makoto, as Chiaki’s confessions end up lost in a web of alternate timelines. Makoto erases Chiaki’s confession into something that never happened, in an attempt to preserve a perfect present of nonchalant familiarity. However, when her aunt listens to Makoto’s wails of stress regarding Chiaki’s confession, she acutely states, “So you’re pretending it never happened. Poor Chiaki. And after he summoned the courage to tell you how he felt. But I suppose he doesn’t even realize that he did.” Makoto’s selfish stress then changes into ambiguity, in a realization that she was forcing her want of a certain present at the expense of taking the people in her life for granted. And as much as I longed for a change in my timeline with the relationship of my friend, just like Makoto was able to, a part of me knew that that would not have changed much—unable to look past his feelings toward me, the days of awkward interaction would have continued nonetheless, as I, in aching guilt, watched Makoto avoiding Chiaki at school after the day of the confession.

When I look back at my friend’s confession made almost a decade ago, what lingers in me like an aching sting is not necessarily the fact that he confessed to me, but more so that I may have ended up pretending his confession never happened. My response of silence on that rooftop is my biggest shame—the fact that I couldn’t reciprocate his verbal confession toward me with a clearly articulated rejection or even acceptance—that I tried so hard to ignore his feelings for me. I never realized it then but after the revival of our friendship after months of awkward exchanges, where he would come to my neighborhood to study for a test, a realization discloses to me in unexpected pain, that I hurt him. That our return to the days of friendship, void of romance, stemmed from my selfishness to remain in the present. 

“Why didn’t l take what he said more seriously?” is what Makoto blurts out, on the verge of tears, after Chiaki disappears for disclosing his secret of coming from the future to Makoto. Makoto’s fear of confrontation, of a change of the mundanity, of the need to face her emotions, transforms into regrets and chances that were taken for granted. And when thinking back on the interaction with my friend that afternoon on the rooftop, I mumble out the same words—I forced him to stay the way he was forever because I was afraid of change. I didn’t want change, even if that was what I genuinely wanted, and I wanted him to selfishly stay.

When I think about my friend—who has been an irreplaceable individual of my tens—of the gifts he gave, notes of concerns he passed when I was feeling under the weather, memes he sent every day, hours he spent in the internet cafe with me where he would patiently teach me how to play his favorite game, it comes to me with an unsettling clarity that I may have reciprocated my feelings for him. That I liked him dearly, and I wanted those subtle exchanges that went beyond the boundaries of friendship to continue. I wanted to give him more than a mere souvenir from a trip but write him a note of appreciation and a hand-made treat on a cheesy romance day dedicated to couples; I wanted us to be more than friends. And said unsettling clarity morphs into a wrenching heartache in me, as it delineates moments that I took for granted, the chances I didn’t take, and memories that could have been real if I were less naive. 

But I was young. My realization of my feelings toward my teenage friend was only disclosed to me after my experience of love, and learning what it means to like someone, which came to me at the start of my twenties, many years later. There was no way of me understanding that my feelings toward my friend were romantic when my troubled thoughts were grasped by the fear of change, of the future when all I wanted was my blissful mundanity to continue. In some ways, I think I felt betrayed by him, that the one person who made me feel comforted urged a change in my small world. So I want to understand the fourteen-year-old me, who wanted to escape the world’s expectation for me to step up; to grow, when I still wanted to be under a shade of oblivion. I want to understand her fear of losing a friend and engaging in a relationship that might have ended up beyond repair, and I understand that her silence toward her best friend’s heartfelt confession was the best decision she could have made at the moment. 

Time, as relentless droplets, rusts the edges of memories. The rigidity of what held our vast universes gently corrodes with the flow of time—as years lapse, all its blunt edges can do is nudge us a little, or even give the slightest tickle. The tearful diary entry that I wrote about my sister yelling at me when I was twelve, the concern of entering a new grade with zero friends in high school, and the resigned scribbling of the fear of entering college when I was seventeen, now appear as mere whispers in the present, where I can’t help but laugh. And yet, the smallest star of the past was once a cosmos, concerns that meant the world to a small girl—wounds may heal over time, but the lingering scars unfold a child’s tumultuous attempt to sail her ship, jumbled in a web of the world’s intricacies, trying her best to untangle the yarns. So who am I to dictate what means less or more, correct or not?

Sometimes the jarring experiences that life introduces to me are too complicated for me in the present to confront with unwavering conviction—sometimes things never align perfectly, and the decisions I have made in the past may cast waves of regrets in the future. Alas, my past and future selves are strangers who never met each other, and remain oblivious to their desires. I kick my feet against the covers thinking about an embarrassing memory from middle school and my mouth gapes in aghast when seeing my controversial take as a kid. Still, perhaps that is the essence—that we are two different people, holding different opinions on favorite films, ruminating on whether they should separate the art from the artist, philosophy in love, and even the nuance in different tastes; no matter how much I could convince my past self to try dating my friend, she would shake her head vigorously, expressing disbelief in her face—I know, because I was that very kid. 

As a revelation blooms upon said kid like spring flowers after a deadly cold winter, she realizes that our sole remedy to the intricacies of life is to sprint ahead like Makoto, gasping in heavy breaths, on her way to meet Chiaki, that the echoes of our past molds our very existence and being. As I look back not only at my dearest friend, but all the souls I have loved in my life, ex-friends from high school, friends who we promised to be best friends for each other till the end, people I was romantically involved in, whom I couldn’t face with sincerity, I find myself entangled in the past, mulling over the things I said, and the things I didn’t—couldn’t—say. Yet, I want to understand the kid navigating said series of uncertainty, who has yet to experience much in life, for it is through that child I exist. I want to harbor a curiosity for the myriads of conundrums the future holds—that the unknown of the future is not merely equivalent to fear, but an unexpected joy, and a reshaping of who I am. I want to—with great determination—wholeheartedly acknowledge that the present will meet its inevitable end. No matter how desperately I grasp onto it, I yearn to understand the significance of the fleeting moments each soul that crosses paths with me gifts me.

I no longer talk to my friend as much as we did years ago. Our last conversation dates back to when I congratulated him on his birthday last year when we blankly promised to see each other in Korea. I saw him momentarily at an impromptu volleyball session held by one of my other high school friends this summer, where we exchanged laughs and brief conversations about what we were each up to. He is adorned with colors of familiarity, yet mixed with streaks of the unknown, but I suppose that’s the beauty of the unfolding future. As I trace my fingers across the corridors of the memories of the fifteen-year-old him, and the two of us in our tens, bantering of school, a new exciting emotion emerges, as I find myself curious of my tomorrows, and his, and what portraits our faces will hold. As I close the doors that invite me back to the past, a question reverberates in my head: “If you could, would you travel back in time, or explore the future?” Letting go of the clutch against the doorknob, I think I would be able to confidently smile and reply, “The future.” — Jae Min Lee

Jae Min (Vivien) Lee is a dedicated multimedia artist and writer hailing from Seoul, South Korea. Having studied Film and Sociology at Smith College, their work is deeply anchored in their love for cinema and media, and their exploration of social phenomena. They are currently enjoying their post-graduation days back home in Seoul, pestering their sister, and writing about things they love.