Chapter 1: Return

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Everything is quiet.

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And then it was not.

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I could hear the sounds of cooking, the voices of some angry people, and sounds of life in general.

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I opened my eyes, expecting to wake up on the road, bleeding profusely, feeling immense pain.

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Perhaps on some hospital area, but that was not the case.

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I was in my room, lying on my bed. There was no pain of any sort.

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Is that just a dream?

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It was a really realistic dream if so. I could still remember the texture of the shopping bag that I was holding, the hazy city lights, and the coldness of the night.

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I recall standing by the crossing, waiting for the traffic lights to turn red despite the empty road.

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And then...

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And then...

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A car appeared out of nowhere. I remember facing it before everything turned white and then black.

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Everything was so fast that if it had been real life, I would probably be horribly injured.

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Taking a step back from my thoughts, I reached for my phone under the pillow and....

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It's nowhere to be found. Which should have been impossible since I have a habit of putting it under my pillow.

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I searched around the bed and I still couldn't find anything.

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I began to realize the other oddities of this situation.

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The bed covers were not the color I remembered it was.

There are a stack of brightly colored books on the table.

The walls are in a slightly different shade.

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And there is flip phone next to the books.

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A flip phone?

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I headed to the table to check that phone out.

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It was a familiar object.

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My old phone from a long time ago.

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There were also schoolbooks and a calendar next to it. A calendar for year 200X.

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I took a second look, suspecting my eyes had fooled me.

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Isn't it the year 201X?

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I checked the date in my phone and it showed the same date.

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5th November 200X.

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Is this another dream? A dream in a dream?

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I gave myself a pinch.

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It hurts.

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Unconvinced, I slapped my face hard.

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I nearly collapsed from that slap.

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Raising the flip phone at eye height, I began examining the thing.

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It's a phone from the 'L' brand and it really seemed to be my old phone.

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It has all my songs that I remember being obsessed with.

It has messges from people that I haven't talked to in a long time.

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What is this absurd situation? I traveled back in time like that fantasy sageuk* drama?

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Feeling a peculiar sense of suffocation, I opened the window of my room, and I saw a scenery that was so familiar yet different from the year 201X.

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It feels uncanny.

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Familiar but uncanny, like something I would see in a dream.

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I watched the skies while my brain got consumed by thoughts.

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I had gone back in time to when I was 15 years old.

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What was it like when I was 15?

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I remember hating school and doing a lot of acting.

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I can't remember much else.

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My life has been involved with acting for a long time. Especially in these years.

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When I was this age, I received fairly a lot of offers to appear briefly in dramas as the younger version of particularly crucial characters, even a few female leads.

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The offers gradually began to reduce as I grew up.

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It's something that happened to a lot of child actors and I wasn't an exception.

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I had a hard time establishing myself as something else than a child actress and finding roles due to my mediocre quality.

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Mediocre looks and mediocre acting.

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Things got even worse when I got let go by my agency, 'Agency N'.

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Although that agency was barely helpful for my career, my situation changed for the worse. It became something comparable to finding a needle in the ocean from finding a needle in a haystack.

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In the end, I just have to settle with getting minor and extra roles to continue acting.

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I always loved acting. It always felt like something that I should do, and I wanted to keep pursuing acting, but it's getting more difficult.

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I went from audition to audition, but the roles that I received could be counted by one hand.

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Even if I got accepted, some projects just didn't get aired and I could still be replaced in the last minute.

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"Ha-na!! Go down and eat your dinner!!."

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A loud voice interrupted my musings.

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Is that my mom?

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Her voice brought me a wave of comfort.

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She has always told me to chase my dreams and to do what I want.

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What is the good of that? I did everything I wanted to, but it lead me nowhere...

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Think about something else, like...I don't know, this whole situation with the time travel?

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The idea that I managed to somehow time travel is still weighing on my brain. I can't think of a reason why it happened to me. I probably got into a car accident, but I did nothing to warrant time travel.

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That day, I was just doing what I usually do, there was nothing out of the ordinary.

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"Ha-na!!!! Dinner!!!!"

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I wanted to think more about this strange phenomenon, but my mom has always had something about eating dinner in time.

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I'll have to think about it later.

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"Yeah!!! I'm going downstairs!!".