To meet you again in the future. #1STKISS

I loved the line 'Let's start a bakery together' from the trailer so much that I went to see the movie 'First Kiss' with the impure motive of 'I have to see this on the big screen!', but it exceeded my expectations in the best way possible.

After watching the whole thing, it finally clicked: 'Oh, that's why it's "1st kiss" and not "first kiss"!!!' Not the first, but the first time. This small difference in English notation makes a big difference.

※From here on, there are major spoilers!!!※

Near the end of the story, in the kiss scene between Kakeru and Kanna, Kanna tries to run away, shyly saying, 'I haven't done that kind of thing in years!' and Kakeru replies, 'For me, it's my first.' It's a scene where he shares his first kiss with his wife from 15 years in the future, before he has even met her.

After watching, I finally realized by looking at the title that in their story, this kiss was the '1st'—the beginning of everything.

It wasn't when the two 30-year-olds met, nor when 45-year-old Kanna went to save her husband after his death, but the moment 30-year-old Kakeru fell in love with 45-year-old Kanna and decided to live his life to go meet her—that was the beginning of their story.

Kanna uses time leaps to go back and meet Kakeru on the same day in his youth over and over again. Meanwhile, Kakeru spent 15 years, dedicating his one and only life, to 'come and meet' that version of Kanna.

Wishing for someone to live even if the future where you become a married couple disappears is love, and wanting to spend time together even if you know you will die is also love.

Trying to redo things over and over to save someone is love, and cherishing the limited time you have in one life is also love.

Like persimmon seeds and peanuts, they are different, so their ways of loving are different, but because they are different, they complement each other and were able to change the future.

That change is very subtle, having almost no impact on anyone but themselves; it is just a change in their relationship and state of mind. It is not a grand finale where everything is solved with a happy ending, but a happy ending found as an optimal compromise within an exquisite balance.

Fate cannot be changed. And I don't want to change my fated person, either.

From the outside, almost nothing that happens to them has changed. But the time they wove together, its density, and their sense of happiness changed significantly due to the time leaps. Even if the ending cannot be changed, the content of the time leading up to it can be.

We cannot go back to the past and redo things like Kanna, but even if we gained the same power as her, I don't think we could change any major events. However, I also think that what we really want to change isn't avoiding tragedy, but the content of the time leading up to it.

29-year-old Kakeru fell in love with 45-year-old Kanna and spent 15 years 'going to meet her.' Meeting 30-year-old Kanna, building up day by day, little by little.

When we think of time leaps, whether going to the past or the future, we imagine jumping years in an instant, but in a sense, couldn't you say Kakeru was also time leaping? Just as Kanna relived the same day over and over, Kakeru spent 15 years reliving every day.

And finally, Kakeru met 45-year-old Kanna again. His first love, whom he had thought of for so many years.

We cannot return to the past or know the future, but just as Kakeru 'time leaped' over 15 years, we might be time leaping toward the future through the small accumulation of our daily lives.

When you are trapped only by what is right in front of you, you see only the unpleasant parts in 4K, you pass each other by precisely because it matters, and you become stubborn because the relationship is close.

However, I feel that if I think of myself as being on the way to meet my future self and my partner, I can avoid losing sight of what is truly important.

Perhaps Kakeru and Kanna, who had decided to divorce before the time leap, didn't really want to divorce either; I think divorce was just the answer they arrived at after being swept along without finding a way to repair their relationship. And after Kakeru passed away, Kanna, without even realizing it herself, had nowhere to vent her sadness and loneliness over the fact that he had died prioritizing others over himself.

A married couple is the only family you can choose for yourself, but it is also the only family relationship you can sever. While it is difficult to legally disown a parent-child relationship, a couple can return to being complete strangers by submitting a single piece of paper.

That is precisely why marriage is difficult.

The parent-child relationship, which can never be severed, has its own difficulties, but because it can never be broken, there are times when things take a turn for the better through trial and error.

However, a relationship that can be severed at any moment has a sense of insecurity where it can collapse without even the room for that trial and error. What is it that makes us want to put in the effort to make it work anyway?

That might be what is called love, but watching First Kiss this time, I thought that the source of that effort might not just be love for the person in front of you at this very moment, but loving them entirely, including their future, and wanting to meet the person they will become.

We cannot meet our future partners, nor can we know what will become of them. But surely, we can imagine it.

While it may seem that the future is an extension of the present, one could also say that the present exists in the middle of the future. Furthermore, the interpretation of the past changes depending on what the future holds, and that interpretation changes how we exist in the present. The divisions between past, present, and future are very ambiguous, and perhaps we are actually living our lives while time-leaping every day.

Let's go meet our future selves again. Let's redo the past, as many times as it takes.

Even if we cannot change the events that occur, we can change the path leading up to them and the relationships we have. It may look like a fantasy, but it is actually a very realistic story.

That is what "First Kiss" was to me.