The Moment I Learned That Possible Worlds Exist

The moment I learned that possible worlds exist.

These days, the most astonishing thing is not the outcome of any event.

Whether it was fate,

whether it was engineered by someone,

or whether it was a coincidence of absurdly slim probability — honestly, none of that matters yet.

The bigger change, for me, was something else.

Realizing that such a possible world might actually exist.

A person judges the world by the world they have lived in.

Emotions we haven't experienced, we call exaggeration;

relationships we've never seen, we call fictional devices;

and things that never happened to us, we assume won't easily happen to anyone else.

I was the same.

I thought certain feelings could only form through accumulated time.

Watching a person for a long while,

learning them one layer at a time,

confirming their countless strengths and flaws —

I thought that only when enough evidence had gathered could you finally arrive at conviction.

I thought effect follows cause.

Observe,

judge,

understand,

and conclude at the very end.

I believed that was the natural order.

But it turns out the world also permits the reverse order.

The case where the conclusion arrives first, and the reasons are fulfilled afterward.

At first, you can't explain it.

You simply intuit a direction, very fast.

And then, as time passes, something strange happens.

The sense that was there from the beginning — the one you couldn't explain — starts having its reasons fulfilled, one by one.

Ah, so that's why.

So it was because of this.

Was some part of me already reading what I couldn't consciously see?

Of course, that doesn't mean the initial sense is necessarily right.

Intuition can be wrong,

people can see what they want to see,

and we can assign meaning to coincidence.

That's why, in real life, time is always required.

But separate from all that, I have already learned one important fact.

That I was a human being capable of feeling such a sense.

Perhaps that was the most astonishing part.

I thought I knew, more or less, what kind of person I am.

How I move in certain situations,

what I consider important,

by what standards I judge people — I thought I knew all this quite well.

Then one day I discovered a version of myself reacting in a way I had never predicted.

And in that moment I understood:

a person only knows the self they have experienced.

The me in front of someone I haven't yet met,

the me inside an event I haven't yet lived,

the me in a world I haven't yet chosen —

even I don't know them.

That is why meeting one person can sometimes be a bigger event than getting to know that person.

Because it becomes the discovery of a possibility that existed inside you but had never once been drawn out.

Maybe it's because that person is special,

maybe it's timing,

maybe it's because I changed,

or maybe it's the simplest coincidence.

I don't know yet.

And I don't particularly want to define everything right now.

But one thing is certain.

I see the world a little more widely than before.

A path I believed didn't exist has appeared.

I learned that things I once considered the stuff of films and novels can absolutely happen in real life.

The probability didn't become 100%.

What I believed was 0% simply stopped being 0%.

And that one small change transforms the entire world.

It's like a road appearing that was never on the map.

There's no need to take that road right now.

I don't even know where it ends.

But now I know.

Such roads exist too.

These days, that is what amazes me most.

It's not that I've come to believe in fate,

nor that I've come to believe in coincidence.

What I learned is something even simpler than that.

Reality is far wider than I thought.

And perhaps the greatest event in a life

is not the moment you gain something,

but the moment you first discover

that a world you believed did not exist

might, in fact, exist after all.