You Can (Not) Go Back

August 18, 2022

Occasionally I find myself struck with staggering force by the thought that I get to live my life just one time, and that once a moment becomes a memory, so it remains forever. I am not talking here of regrets, nor of nostalgia. I am talking, I suppose, of a feeling akin to waking from a pleasant dream, and wishing that I could close my eyes and sink back into the world I had just left. The dream is perhaps one in which something dead is alive, or something lost has been found. I wake up and find, again, that what is dead is dead, and what is lost is often lost forever.

This essay is written in the spirit of that awakening — that moment when it occurs to me in concrete terms: You Can Not Go Back. Rarely in our waking lives do we sincerely believe that we can go back; we understand that our past self is a ghost, and that the futures he imagined have died with him. We understand this, and yet, it is impossible to kill this yearning. It is impossible not to believe that, somehow, the past still exists out there somewhere, if we could only find it…

I wore this very sweater on that day, sitting on the curb of a long-lost Tokyo street, taking pictures of myself in a brand new pair of ridiculous reflective orange sunglasses I had bought hours before at the Shibuya 109. My stomach was full of some strange spherical ice-cream products whose name contained the word "pop" or "popper." I even have a picture, if you'd like to see it.

We were waiting for a bus. Someone was mad at me, or perhaps she had forgiven me at that point; I can’t remember. I had spent the day trying to please too many people by wearing multiple different contradictory personalities at once. I had failed and succeeded in equal measure. As is generally the case, I failed with the one person I cared about, and succeeded with several people I would never see again. And all I had to show for it in the end were these stupid sunglasses.

Yep, and through all that, I was wearing this very sweater. If you can believe it! This one I have on right now. Even I find it a little hard to believe that this sweater — this sweater that adorns my person at this very moment — has some sort of physical connection to that day. That day which I can never ever return to! Why then, is this sweater still around, when the day is lost forever? The complex web of interpersonal tension that formed the emotional substrate of that day-long day-trip can never be reformed, and yet here I am, sitting in its sweater.

When I think of these sorts of things, I get a unique kind of knot in my stomach. It is the same knot I used to feel as a child when I would be sitting around, maybe reading a book, and I would suddenly get an idea of something else to do. Let’s say I wanted to go outside and play hockey. The second the idea entered my head, I felt that I had to go; it was as if a part of me was already outside playing, and my body just needed to catch up. I would try to finish the paragraph I was reading, but my muscles would tense up in anticipation, and my eyes could no longer focus. I was already gone.

When I think of that Tokyo curb, I get the feeling that I am actually there, and not here. That the me here is in the wrong place and the wrong time, and that where I'm supposed to be, where I absolutely have to be, is back there. And unlike before, when I could just put the book down and go outside, there is no way to remove this knot; it just sits there, growing ever tighter and tighter, until it starts to feel like there is something absolutely wrong with this one-way world — that really, in all fairness, we should be able to go back. It begins to feel cruel and unfair that I am trapped here, and not there. What dastardly and devious god made it so? What infernal deity imprisoned me in this eternal procession, this undignified march ever forward into some unknown future? I don't want to go forward! It's strange and scary and dangerous that way! I want to go back!

No matter how happy I am in this world and this time, I want to go back. No matter how sad and lonely and stupid I was in the past, I would give anything to return.

When I was twenty years old on that Tokyo streetside, I was an idiot. I had no idea what I was doing. Three months earlier, I had ended a relationship in a truly catastrophic fashion. Now, I was on the verge of entering a new relationship in the most bumbling way possible. Everything I did was a form of stumbling; I couldn't comprehend anything going on around me, and when occasionally I did comprehend something, I was generally worse off for it. My intentional decisions were just as self-destructive as my accidents.

Looking back now, I feel that I can make a certain amount of sense out of the situation I was in. I can see which of my worries were reasonable, and which were entirely unfounded. I can see what got me into trouble. I can probably even think of a few very specific actions that I wish I had done differently. But that isn't why I want to go back. Not at all. Like I said, this is not about regret. I want to go back and do everything exactly the same. I want to go back and make the exact same mistakes, because the stupidity and the awkwardness and the discomfort were what made it all so exciting. Yeah, I was sad, and yeah, I was kinda lonely, and yeah, I was burdened even back then with the knowledge that I was doing everything incorrectly. That's all true, and I want it all back. I want to submerge myself in it. It doesn't matter why. I just want to.

I want to, quite possibly, only because I can't. I want my past because it's gone, and I don't like it when things are gone. They always leave too suddenly, and you never get to say goodbye.

Months later, I would spend a day in Osaka with two girls I was trying to say goodbye to. I was in love with one of them. I mean, we were in love with each other, as far as either of us could tell. The four of us — myself, the girl I loved and who loved me, her good friend, and my good friend — decided to spend the day enjoying ourselves. It was our last day together. It was their last day in Japan. Their bus left at 9:30pm.

We met at a Family Mart around lunchtime, where we sat down at a table and drank hot chocolates while we searched on our phones for somewhere, anywhere to go. It became clear, almost immediately, that we were not going to enjoy ourselves. None of us said so — we all pretended we were having fun — but really, we were tired. We had been tourists already for so long. We wanted to go home. We got together to say goodbye, but it was already too late for goodbye. We were already ghosts to each other; now, we were just killing time until we could mourn.

We decided to go to the zoo. When we arrived, it was closed. We stood at the gates, not saying anything. We went to dinner. While we ate, I began to think about how terrible I would feel when the girl I loved was gone. I felt it so strongly that I couldn't even look at her. I couldn't eat. I wanted to throw up. Already, she was so far away. Already, she was a memory. Looking at her was like looking at an old photograph. Our friends tried to make conversation, but we had nothing to say.

We had never had anything to say. It had never been about words at all. It had been the two of us together in a strange place during a very strange time. The strange time was over, and we were leaving the strange place. We were going home. There was no use pretending anymore. I looked at her and I saw all the pain and suffering I had deliberately planned for myself. I saw the heartbreak I had devised as the catalyst for my ultimate destruction. All was going according to plan, and it sucked.

After dinner, we waited at the bus terminal for three hours. My friend went back to our hotel. I decided to wait until the bus came, because I knew that if I left early, I would regret it. But really, it wouldn't have made any difference. She showed me pictures of her home, of her friends. But it wasn't funny anymore. It wasn't whimsical. It wasn't fleeting. It was just over. It was over and I sat there anyway, bored, staring at the wall, because that was what I had to do.

There was no goodbye. When the PA announced their bus, they stood up, gathered their bags, and walked out the door. We may have said a few words, but who knows what they were. They didn't mean anything, anyway. I don't even remember what she looked like as she walked away. Perhaps I didn't even look.

For six months, I somehow convinced myself that she wasn't gone. I convinced myself that I would see her again, someday. I believed that we were still together, although we weren't, at all. No matter how many inane messages we sent each other every few weeks, we were strangers.

There was no day when I woke up and realized I was living in a fantasy. It happened gradually. There was no goodbye. We just stopped talking. We stopped talking because we had never been saying anything in the first place. I realized that I didn't need to be with her as much as I just needed to know that she existed out there, somewhere.

She gave me her umbrella, as she left. I just remembered this, as I was looking back at an old piece of writing. She gave me an umbrella with a pattern that was remarkably similar to one of her favourite dresses. I carried the umbrella with me as I passed through the empty tunnel that led to Osaka-Umeda station. I couldn't remember where my hotel was. My phone was dead. I wandered around like I had nowhere to go, each step feeling a mile long. Eventually, I found a street I recognized. I made it back to the capsule hotel around midnight. I changed into my pyjamas, and found my friend in the lounge. He was playing a game on his laptop. I bought an ice cream bar from a vending machine. I bought a CC Lemon from another vending machine. I sat down next to him. "How's it going?" he asked.

"It sucks," I said. I watched a TV that hung on the wall. It was playing a program in which a fat man had to visit a certain number of ramen shops in one day. He had to run from one shop to the next. He was sweating a ton. At each shop, he spun a wheel that determined which side dish he had to eat. He slurped his noodles loudly. He yelled. "Meccha umai!"

I laughed. I dripped ice cream onto my robe.

I just looked up from my computer and out the window. How far away that all is now! I'm in a different world. And yet, for the last hour, I haven't been here at all.

I suppose I did myself a favour, all those years ago, when I wrote this all down. That's what allows me to recall all these details that would inevitably have slipped away. I wrote it down because I knew that one day I would want to go back. I knew if I didn't write it down, all I would have was fuzzy images and unanswerable questions. With these concrete images, I can reconstruct it all, and live it through again!

I can go back!

But something has changed. Something is very different. Yes, I can go back, but only in the same way that I can re-read a novel. I can read it and it’s all familiar; as characters and scenes rush by, I find that I recognize them all, even if I haven’t thought of them since. What a thrill! But at the same time, what a let-down.

When I re-live that day, I don't re-live it as a tumbling down an unfamiliar path. I don't experience it as the last thing that's ever going to happen to me. It's just one chapter among many. I know what happens next. I know that something happens next. I know that the world kept turning, bringing with it new people and new events. I know what I didn't know then — that I would never see her again, and that eventually, it wouldn't feel like that big of a deal.

It was a big deal, back then. It was a big deal for a long time. It was the End of the World. That sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore. You lose that as you get older. When you are twenty years old, with the maturity necessary to experience grand, emotional events, but none of the maturity necessary to place them in any sort of context, or place them on any sort of scale, the future is as strange and terrifying as a nightmare, and just as real. But eventually, the future happens, and over time, via inductive reasoning, you start to realize that not only has the sun risen every morning, but that it will continue to do so. Eventually, you are no longer twenty years old, and you will never be again.

In many ways, it's best that I can't go back. In many ways, things are much better now, when days are just days, and tomorrow is just tomorrow.

But it would be such a rush, wouldn’t it, to feel that just one more time?