A second chance.
That was what I wished for.
The one thing I prayed for every night before I sleep. The one thing I prayed for, at the very night before I woke up in an entirely different life.
A new life.
My second chance.
❈❈❈
I was 30 years old wh...
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—First life. Jung Family's Residence, year 2027—
For the rest of the afternoon after I had the talk with Hoseok, I secured myself in my old room.
I had never noticed it when I first got back or when I first entered the room, but everything was pretty much the same. My old small bed was still there, the white paint all over the bed frame had been chipped yet the other parts were still intact. The wall seemed like it was freshly painted, and it made me feel like everything in this room had stopped, frozen in time, while the world out there kept going on, spiralling out of control as lives being torn apart.
The only difference I noticed was how small this room felt all so suddenly. Not only because I had grown a lot, for the last time I was sleeping in this very room was during my college days, but also for how much life had been weighing me down. How much I have experienced and had gone through ever since I left this place.
I sat with my legs crossed on the bed, opening an old shoebox that I had just retrieved from my closet earlier. I smiled when I looked at its content, finding everything that I had left behind was still in there. My time capsule, I remembered calling it. And I also remembered how I was sitting the same way I was doing now, sitting crossed-legs on the bed, placing all of this stuff inside the box while I imagined how I would react on the day I would be opening it and looking through them again. Except unlike today, I was not alone. Taehyung was there with me, sitting with his own long legs crossed right across from me on the bed as he added a few things of his own choosing into the box.
I swallowed thickly as pain came to me along with the memory of my long, lost best friend. And my chest clenched even tighter when I pulled out an old polaroid of us, of Taehyung and me, taken on the day we were leaving our homes to attend college.
We were standing next to my father's old car, with our backs on the vehicle while Taehyung had his arm around my shoulder. Our young faces were beaming with excitements despite we were probably still exhausted after packing up our belongings and did our best to fit everything inside the trunk of the car. Seeing our happy, oblivious faces, it made me smile, as I remembered all the things we talked about on that day as we were ready to leave the town. But the smile faded as I looked down under the picture and read the scribbled words, written down with a black marker underneath—
"Reaching for our dreams — 2015"
Dreams.
A wave of emotions came to me just then, as I remembered how we were when we were young. We were so full of hope. We had big dreams. We wanted too many things in life and we believed that we would be able to reach for them as long as we were brave enough to leave our small town. And we were brave enough. We did it all together. But then everything changed. I could not remember when did everything go so wrong; how the both of us changed, how our dreams and our hopes changed. In the end, we both changed into different people and then so did our lives.
