“Time Traveling”
The enchanting dreamy view never fails to entertain me up in the sky. It’s been 8 months since my camera roll has filled up with that many snaps, filming clouds that change its shape every minute. My ears already had enough of the plastic headphones; I decided on giving them a short rest before my third movie.
A visit to Japan takes around 14 hours. The long flight to my home country allowed me to spend a luxurious time “sit back, and enjoy the flight”. The various choices of movies, dramas and music hyped me up, there was so much I could do.
Staring out the window, my mind drifted off to some thoughts and settled down to one wonder.
Why does the flight hours and time difference don’t mathematically match?
Knowing this might not be the type of question that leads to a satisfying answer, I took out my boarding pass.
I read how I left Houston at 9/10 11:50 (EST), and will land in Tokyo at 9/11 15:30 (JST). That’s a 27 hours and 40 minute difference mathematically, but I was supposed to be flying for only 14.
Poof, the 13 hours and 40 minutes just disappeared like magic.
It would be quite interesting if it was really magic, but I stayed at my logical thinking. The Earth rotates and revolves around the sun. When one hemisphere is experiencing morning, the other half will be asleep in the dark. It’s nothing unbelievable for countries to have time differences, and flying over it in a fast velocity is understandable as well.
But something still didn’t feel right. My brain kept taunting me about the blank hours, where the 13 hours went, if they add on to another person or animal’s lifetime, or if they are left in outer space…
Then I noticed, set free from the black scribbles all over my head. The time lost doesn’t go anywhere, it waits for you to hop on another flight back to where you were at. For me, moving from Japan adds on some hours to my day, and returning to Japan meant resetting the lag I’ve made before. This time, I balanced out the extra 13 hours and 40 minutes I made on the last flight…
Hold up.
I restart confusing my own thoughts. My inner self raises her hand and I call on her.
What happens when I move to a different country with a different time zone and live there for the rest of my life?
Me inside me, proudly finished invading her own mind with another millions of theories.
This is a good question for deep thinking, so I went back and analyzed. In this case, living in a foreign country until death would stop me from the chance to regain the lost time, nor get rid of the extra gain.
Taking a few minutes, I interpreted every logic I could brainstorm. I continued thinking and thinking, but my burnt brain ended up leaving it all to fantasy related ideas. I gave out a sigh, exhausted from confusion.
But didn’t I know this from the beginning? How this can be an open-ended question that won’t be proven with any database. Nothing to get stressed about, just an interesting fun little topic to discuss with myself. I suddenly realize my 10 minute obsession for an abnormality which would impact mostly nothing of one’s life. Many humans do grave themselves in a place far from their birth land and they hopefully don’t use any magic.
Some things are just meant to be like this, and I had the right to leave it like this.
I saw another beautiful cloud, I would definitely buy it if it were a painting. I pulled out my phone from my bag below the seat in front of me. I snapped another picture, my mind swiftly moving on to another debatable topic, wondering what movie I should watch next.