Flying cars thrust upon the clear, deep blue sky. I opened the glass door, and the bell rang. I walked past gleaming white shelves with transparent cylindrical time capsules on them and reached the shop owner, a beautiful young lady of about twenty, the same age as me. 

“How may I help you?” she asked.

“Umm, yes, I think there’s a problem with my time capsule,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Sir, but there’s no problem with our time capsules. They are perfectly designed to allow you to receive messages from your past self.”

“Look, it predicted it too.” I passed the capsule to her.

“She’ll awkwardly say that there’ll be no problem,” she read.

“Sir, is this some kind of joke?” she asked.

“No.”

“I suggest you take the advice of your past self and leave.” She passed the note back to me. I walked back to the door and received a new message. I read the date at the top: 2070, thirty years from now.

He opened the door, and a car went past in front of him. He pinned himself to the door for a whole minute, his heart pounding like it ripped out of his chest and came close to his ear. The heat from the car’s thrusters still burning his chest.

“Hey, James,” said a ginger-haired girl as she approached him. Her skin was as golden as the sun, and her lips as red and soft as the petals of a rose. 

He took out the capsule and read from the middle. “Your wife, Lucy, will approach you. Say hi to her for me. She’ll ask you to see her parents. Make a good impression. I’ll tell you how.”

He scruffed the note back into his pocket. “She isn’t my wife.”

“What?” she said. “Were you talking about me?”

“Um, no.”

“Hm, listen.”

“Hi.”

She smiled. “Hi, listen my dad wants to meet you.”

Days turned into weeks, and weeks into months. He sat on his comfy chair with his baby boy playing on the carpet in front of him. Lucy sat a little farther away.

“Come on,” she said. “Come on. Come to Mama.”

The note stuck to his pocket. The day was December the 2nd, the day he was going to walk for the first time. So, his eyes didn’t widen like hers when he took his first step and stretched his hands out. He didn’t bend to the edge of his seat as he fell into her arms. She grinned from ear to ear and looked at him. But he only stared at her in confusion. That’s it? That’s the moment I have been waiting for the past three months. He only took a few steps and fell. What is this? I got up from his seat and walked a while before Lucy caught his hand. “Did you see that? He walked! With his two tiny legs. Wasn’t he cute?”

I grinned like this a long, long time ago when I read it in the time capsule. My cheeks became red and my lips reached my ears from grinning, but then I looked around and found no child of mine. It was all on an emotionless screen. But now that I see it with my own eyes, now that I hear his little feet tap on the ground, I feel nothing. It's like a movie on Rewind. I am like that screen, emotionless.

Years went by and every time I waited for that one special moment, which would finally bloom my world, it never came, or to say otherwise, it came again and again, but each time it failed me.

“You are never happy!” Lucy yelled in the middle of the night. We both stood in the kitchen with the bulb that flickered each time she yelled. I read this moment a month ago, so I prepared all day just for this fight. So, it didn't affect me all that much. I let her speak and pour out all her anger. She cursed me and said everything boiling within her. But in the end, she started crying. I expected it, my heart ached, and my chest tightened. I still couldn't let tears stain her face, so I wrapped my arm around her and tucked her.

“Why don't you listen to me?” she whispered.

“I do listen to you.”

“Then say something.”

My eyes widened. What can I say? The capsule never said to say something to her. I guess I never figured out the words. Well, I am an adult, right? I can do it myself. Yeah, yeah, why not? I looked back at her, and my eyes widened. Do I have to say them now? For all day I prepared for a fight yet I never figured out the words. Tears swirled in her pearl-white eyes. I stared at them for ten minutes and then said the most generic thing that came to my mind, “I am sorry. I’ll do better.”

The moonlight beamed through the open window in front of me. I paced around my room as I rubbed my head.

The capsule warned me of this, didn't it? Why did my mind go blank then? I gripped the capsule tight in my hand. Maybe because there is nothing in my mind. I am a puppet, following blindly. Lucy went into a deep slumber on the bed. Cool air ruffled my hair, and a chill ran through my spine.

The little happiness I have is because of this capsule. What has this life given me? Maybe this capsule has sucked the life out of me! Agh! I have everything, yet I feel none of it. Nothing! I feel nothing!

I grabbed the time capsule and weighed it in my hand. The weight of my life. Some pages earlier I read something special will happen today. Maybe I shouldn’t sleep tonight. I tightened my grip around the time capsule. I winced my eyes and threw the capsule out the window. I slipped into my blanket and my eyes closed. In the middle of the night, my child cried. I hopped out of my bed and picked him up. I smiled at him and shook him lightly. He stopped crying, and his eyes sparkled as he smiled. His soft cotton hands touched my cheeks, and he said, “Dada.”

At that moment, I felt a flicker of something long buried—a genuine smile. Not born from the words on a screen but from the depths of my heart.