Have You Regressed Too?
I noticed it immediately—Shin Yujin’s habit of pressing her thumb with her index finger, over and over. It happened while she sipped her coffee. It happened again when she set her cup on the tray to clear the table. That small gesture kept snagging my attention, refusing to let go.
Could Shin Yujin have come back fourteen years too? If not, her habit made no sense at all.
“Yuchan.”
“Yeah? What?”
“Let’s head out now.”
“Uh, sure.”
With that unanswered question still rattling around in my head, we cleaned up and stepped out of the café. From the vibe between them, it was obvious Kim Yerim and Hojin were about to spend some time alone. Which meant I would end up paired with Shin Yujin.
If I hadn’t seen that hand habit, we probably would have passed the time like any other twenty-year-olds on a first meeting and then gone our separate ways. But now that I had seen it, treating her like the Shin Yujin who was simply twenty years old felt impossible.
“Yujin and I are going to spend some time on our own. What about you two?” Kim Yerim asked.
“Huh? Well…”
While I hesitated, Kim Yerim leaned in close to Shin Yujin and whispered something. Shin Yujin looked like she wanted to argue and refuse, but Yerim kept pushing, relentless. In the end, Shin Yujin and I were left to stroll along the street together.
“If this is uncomfortable, we can just head home separately,” I offered.
“…It’s all right. Since we’ve already met like this, let’s walk a little and talk before we go.” Her voice was polite, a touch higher than I remembered.
“Yeah. Okay.”
“Are you uncomfortable, Yuchan-ssi?”
“No, not really.”
A short silence settled over us. Neither of us rushed to break it. In my memory, the twenty-three-year-old me had taken the lead during this exact stretch of time, gently guiding a hesitant Shin Yujin. I had lightened the mood so the awkward girl could smile.
Should I do the same thing now? Even though I knew the Shin Yujin walking beside me had also returned fourteen years into the past?
Part of me wanted to ask her directly, but the fear that my guess could be wrong—and the fragile atmosphere that might shatter—kept my tongue still.
“This is my first time at a group blind date, so it feels a little unfamiliar,” she said.
“That makes sense. I felt the same way at first.”
“Have you been to many gwating events?”
“I went a couple times when I was twenty.”
“Then this would be your third. It probably doesn’t feel strange to you at all, Yuchan-ssi.”
“Once you think of it as meeting people and expanding your network, it gets easier to handle.”
Her voice in my ear sounded strangely new. Had it always been this calm, this quietly captivating? Over the span of fourteen years, it wasn’t just our relationship that had changed—countless other things had shifted too.
When we were dating, she had been a lot like the woman beside me now. After the dating stage, after marriage, as time passed she had slowly transformed into the Shin Yujin I knew best: a voice that had lost its sweetness and often cracked, strands of white scattered through her long brown hair, the first wrinkles beginning to show on her face.
I tried to pinpoint exactly when so many things between us had started to change, but no clear moment came to mind. At some point the gears that once fit perfectly had slipped out of alignment. And the more I tried to force them back together, the more they wore down.
“Do you have a favorite food, Yujin?” I asked.
“I like omurice. You like tteokgalbi, right, Yuchan-ssi?”
“Huh? Did I mention that before?”
“Ah… I just guessed. Almost nobody dislikes tteokgalbi, after all.”
“True. It’s my absolute favorite.”
“My mom makes it really well.”
I already knew that, of course. I loved tteokgalbi enough that we used to hunt for the best restaurants together, and I could easily finish three bowls if my mother-in-law cooked it. Shin Yujin, on the other hand, adored omurice; she always said the ones I made were her favorite. Whenever we ate out, she would order omurice without fail if it was on the menu.
She had named my favorite dish before I could say it myself—the exact reverse of how I had once named her favorite coffee. The questions in my head were steadily hardening into certainty.
We kept walking until we found an empty bench and sat down.
“The weather’s nice and warm. Must be because May is almost here,” she said.
“Yeah. It’ll get hot before we know it. What’s your favorite season?”
“I like winter. What about you, Yuchan-ssi?”
“Summer. Looks like we’re complete opposites.”
She was exactly like the twenty-year-old Shin Yujin I remembered. The only difference was that small hand gesture that kept pulling my eyes back to it.
Because it wouldn’t leave me alone, I finally asked the direct question.
“You’ve been pressing your index finger with your thumb since earlier. Is that a habit?”
“What?! This? Oh, this is…”
An expression of pure panic I had never seen on her face before. She glanced down at her own hand, thinking hard. The silence stretched until she finally spoke.
“When I was little, I fractured my finger. The habit started after that.”
“Really? Even after it healed, isn’t it bad to keep doing that?”
“Well… yes, but it’s a habit now.”
“Habits don’t break easily.”
I tried to come up with more questions about sides of Shin Yujin I didn’t already know, but nothing occurred to me. In a way, I knew so much about her that it sometimes felt like I understood her better than she understood herself. She liked winter because she loved the sight of pure white snow covering everything. She enjoyed the crunching sound and the footprints left behind with every step.
Thinking about it like that, I suddenly wondered whether Shin Yujin knew as much about me as I did about her.
“What are you doing after this? Any plans?” I asked.
“I’m going home to finish my assignments and rest. There’s quite a lot this time.”
“Do freshmen really get that many assignments? You might have picked the wrong professor.”
“I registered because everyone said he was a good teacher. I didn’t expect this much work.”
“What kind of assignments does he give?”
“Reports, English text analysis, writing exercises—that sort of thing.”
It was a heavy load, but none of it would be particularly difficult for Shin Yujin. Even if the report took time, she could probably finish everything in about an hour. And of course her English skills meant her midterm and final grades were excellent on top of that.
“You’re a sophomore now, right, Yuchan-ssi?”
“Yeah. I enlisted at twenty-one, got discharged, and came back to school.”
“I heard computer engineering gets insanely busy starting from the second year.”
“It’s definitely different from freshman year, but I enjoy coding. It’s manageable.”
“Really? It’s rare to actually like your own major.”
“Don’t you like yours, Yujin?”
“I do. I’ve always loved English, so the major is fun. Though as a freshman there isn’t much major-specific work yet.”
Just like that, Shin Yujin and I were the strange couple who both loved their majors more than anyone else. People around us constantly teased us for being weird. It was uncommon enough for one person in a couple to enjoy their field of study—both of us liking ours made us look downright bizarre.
“Have you gone to MT or joined any clubs?” I asked.
“No. I’m not really into those kinds of activities, so I didn’t participate.”
“That’s where the fun is—building your network, getting to know new people.”
As I studied her face more closely, I spotted yet another difference from the moment I remembered. It was her expression. This was supposed to be her very first gwating as a twenty-year-old. She had never liked these kinds of events, so she couldn’t have had any similar experience.
Yet her face showed clear familiarity. She looked as if the situation wasn’t new at all—as if she had lived through it before. The moment I saw that expression, the half-formed certainty in my mind locked into place completely.
“Shall we get going? It’s gotten pretty late.”
“Ah, yeah. Let’s go.”
We stood and began retracing our steps at a leisurely pace. To solidify the certainty now rooted in my head, I needed to ask the question. If things went the way I expected, her answer would confirm that Shin Yujin had regressed fourteen years just like me.
But what if she hadn’t?
What if something I didn’t know about had changed because of the regression?
If she reacted with genuine confusion, how was I supposed to respond?
“Yujin-ah.”
“Yes, Yuchan-ssi?”
A strange anxiety held me back, but it couldn’t stop me.
“You also came back fourteen years like me, didn’t you?”
And with that, I finally spoke the question that had been lingering in my mind the entire time.