Life, Once Again!

versation as well.
The atmosphere became brighter in an instant.

“Unni, would you meet another man if you’re younger?”

“No.
I wouldn’t be able to meet my daughter if I did that.”

“Geez, you’re too silly.”

“You’ll understand once you give birth to a child like me.”

“I already had indirect experience through writing.
How many moms do you think I’ve written about that are obsessed with their children? You wouldn’t know how many emotional babies I’ve given birth to.”

“Fine, you’re popular, okay? What would a third-rate romance author like me tell a big-shot writer?”

“Now you see the difference?”

“I think you need some slapping.”

Seeing the two giggling, she was reminded of something she wanted to think about.

“Ahjumma, what if you have to throw away your memories in order to go back to the past?”

“Throw away my memories?”

“Yes.
If some god or alien tells you that you can’t bring your memories back to the past with you, are you still going to go?”

“Now that, I’m going to have to think about it.
If I can go back to the past with my intact memories, I think I can go without hesitation, but if I can’t then there’s no merit, is there? If I have the same ego in the same era, I’ll probably end up living a similar life.
Is there a reason to go back to the past then?”

Just then, her mother interrupted.

“There’s no charm in that story.
Why is the main character a main character? It’s because he or she has something that other people look up to.
Let’s just assume that the character goes back with all of their memories.”

“Unni, the trend in dramas these days isn’t like that.
Where’s the fun in a character who knows everything? They need to go through a trial.
Just like your romance novels, there needs to be a love rival to be more interesting.”

The conversation started burning brightly again.
She felt like she had stepped on a landmine, but the two women were already deeply immersed in talking about the topic.
She could only listen to them.
Ah, one more thing.
She had to be ready for Hanmi’s sudden questions.

“What if you slowly lose your memories? At first, you passionately fall in love with your loved one, but the memories become faint, and then time-transcending love turns into just an ordinary love for a youth in that era,” Hanmi said.

She listened with interest as she ate some salmon salad.

“But there’s no problem with that right? They love each other already.”

“That’s why we should change it up a little.
You’re going to meet your husband even if you go back to the past, right?”

“Am I supposed to give you a serious answer?”

“Of course.”

“Like I said before, I am going to meet him again.
And I’ll meet my daughter again too.
As long as I have my memories and affections of this life, I don’t think I’ll be able to easily meet someone else.”

“That’s precisely it.
That’s what a time-transcending love is.
The person you unwillingly departed with in the future is still alive and well in the past.
If you really liked that person, you would grab him thinking that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity.”

“Right.”

“Even if that person in the past does not like me, I’ll still like him, right? Because I’ve been in love with that man in the ‘future’.”

“My husband will probably confess to me on our first meeting, you know? He couldn’t live without me after all.”

“Fine, stop boasting, sheesh.
Anyway, it’s all good until you go back and meet the person you love and live a happy life.
That’s when the trial starts.
You slowly start losing memories.
The personality, impressions, and preferences you knew about that person slowly disappear.”

“I think I’ll still love him though? Memory is just information after all.
I believe that a person possesses something that is superior to memories formed by the brain’s electrical and chemical signals.”

“Like a soul you mean?”

“Maybe it’s something like that, or maybe it’s called a heart.”

“Unni, you know what amnesia is, right?”

“I understand what you’re trying to say, but I still believe that there’s something that transcends information.
Otherwise, it’s just too cruel, you know? I’m sure that love is something special that does not rely on memories.”

“Do you really think so? In our heads, there’s something called the frontal lobe, and damage to that part causes a lot of disabilities, one of the significant ones being the loss of emotions.
That’s why that might cause someone to become antisocial, and such a person doesn’t have something called altruism.
They would justify themselves with anything they do without realizing what they’ve done wrong even if they make a mistake.
That’s just a result of a part of the brain not functioning properly.
And here, we’re talking about losing memories as a whole, which make up the foundation of a human.
In some sense, that’s the same as becoming dull to emotions.
You know that even the most passionate love is bound to cool down, right? If your warm moments get erased, don’t you think you’ll fall in love with a new person just like everyone else?”

“So you want to say that memories are everything?”

“Reasonably speaking, one’s personality is the amalgamation of experience, right? And experience becomes systemized into a mechanism that reacts to external stimulation.
Doesn’t that mean that everything is caused by memories?”

“Despite that, we can’t even be sure of the existence of god, right? As long as agnosticism exists, the theory that the mind comes before memories will always exist as well.”

“That’s too unscientific.”

“Is going back to the past scientific? Einstein would love to have a word with you.”

“But this is an agreement.”

“I’ve never agreed to it.”

“I can’t get anything through to you, can I?”

“Hah, that’s funny.”

She looked at the two women who glared at each other and sighed.
She thought about the topic while she did so.
Memories versus the soul.
Which was on a deeper level?

‘I wished it was the soul.’

If the disappearance of memories meant the disappearance of emotions, that would be too sad.

“Forget it, just drink!”

“Right, let’s drink!”

It seemed that the two adults reached the conclusion that they should get drunk. She shook her head.
These two adults were really hopeless.

‘Rather than that, I wonder if he went back home properly after meeting her.’

She looked at the clock on the wall.
It was 7:40 p.m.
She felt that it was still quite early.
She wondered if she should text him or something, when,

“Unni, you should’ve been careful.”

Her mother spilled some water.
She put her phone down and went to the kitchen.

[1] Wikipedia link for more details.