Time travel doesn’t exist, and I don’t think it ever will. If it did, wouldn’t we have time travellers walking amongst us in the present times?

Who are we, mere parasites on a planet in the grander scheme of things, to manipulate such a primordial force as time?

Nothing is as unrelenting as the constant ticking of the clock—the seconds that pass, the days that dissolve into weeks, and the years that turn us into strangers even to ourselves.

But damn, are we really good parasites.

While we couldn’t figure out a way to reverse time’s flow or speed it up, we did find a way to stop it.

Photos.

Photos are amazing, aren’t they? You suspend a scene in the otherwise endless marching of time, forever to be kept a most perfect souvenir. 

The digital revolution is fascinating. Back then, photographs were a luxury, requiring expensive equipment, film, and professional processing. Before that, portraits were a privilege of the rich, a way for the powerful to insist, I was here. 

Generations lived and died unrecorded, leaving only the faintest traces in someone else’s memory.

Now, we see something we’d like to keep in memory, and we’d just pull up a magic box from our pockets, press a few buttons, and voilà, a photo.

I keep my own: stored on my phone, taped to my walls, or forever scattered and existing on the limitless expanse of social media. 

Photos of places I’ve been, people I’ve loved, things I’ve seen. Group photos in restaurants I used to haunt with friends who have since disappeared into their own lives. Selfies on the quiet, ominous streets by my old place, lit only by scattered streetlights as I walked home from midnight hangouts. Views of the skyline shimmering against the night sky from a hill where we’d collapse after study sessions, the air thick with laughter and exhaustion.

I look at them every now and then. And when I do, it’s as if I relive them for at least a second, as if time hesitates. For a breath, I am there again—smiling in my graduation photos, laughing too loud during lab activities, caught in the blur of youth and the illusion of permanence.

They are old versions of me frozen in time, not gone, but not quite alive. Like a mausoleum of past existences sitting on the back of my mind. 

And sometimes I wish I could go back to the smiles behind the photos. Go back to the air that touched my skin years ago, to the people who made me feel welcome in my first years in the big city.

In the past, I thought everything felt new, even the struggles. The sleepless nights cramming for exams, the meals of instant noodles eaten on my almost broken table, the long walks home when I didn’t have spare change for a ride—it all seemed like it was part of a great adventure.

Now, exhaustion feels heavier. It lingers longer in the bones, as though growing older means carrying not just your own weight anymore, but the weight of expectations too. Different schedules, different people, way heavier academic load—it’s a whole different story compared to the fairytale that high school seemed to be. It’s life, stripped of its illusions but still moving forward.

And yet.

These versions of me live and breathe in the short moments when I view them again. There’s a subtle difference, isn’t there? The smiles I wear now feel heavier, not in a bad way, but as if they’ve learned the weight of things. I feel the same weight in others, and through it, I understand that they, too, have come to the same realizations.

Back then, joy came uninvited, like sunlight spilling through half-open curtains. Now, it’s something I notice more carefully, something I cradle so it doesn’t slip away too quickly.

Maybe that’s why I keep those photos close. They remind me of the self I was, and that it still exists somewhere in the fabric of my being. These photos remind me of everything I’ve carried forward, the versions of myself that learned, failed, and endured.

Maybe that’s why I think full-blown time-travel shouldn’t exist. If we could return, we’d just have people chasing ghosts of themselves, desperate to rewrite a scene, to run back to the summers of our youth, the embraces we never wanted to end, the words we should have said but didn’t. 

The timeline would collapse under the weight of our regrets and longings.

We aren’t meant to relive—we’re meant to remember. That’s the softer version of time travel we’ve been given: memory to be kept in photographs.

And maybe that’s enough. Maybe it has to be, the closest thing to time travel.