If You Could Go Back In Time, Which Regret Would You Erase?

What would you do if you heard there was a café in your city that could send you back in time? What if you learned that even if you went back in time, nothing you did could change the present? Would you still want to go back?

I bet everyone who heard this would line up. Because I believe every one of us has reasons to go back in time: our regrets, “what ifs”, etc. Some aspects of being human can drive us to act irrationally, like wanting to go back in time. And that is exactly what the characters of Before the Coffee Gets Cold do. Their regrets, their passion towards future, longings towards their past make them take action as risky as travelling to the past. It is risky because there are some rules to revisit the past. 

The first rule of going back in time is that you can only meet with people who have visited the café. So, if you have any plans other than meeting with the person you visited the café with, forget about it. If you are okay with the first rule, there is the second rule which you should not be forgetting about: there is nothing you can do or say to change the past. If someone left you, you would still be left. If someone died, that person would still be dead when you come back. There is no point to admit all these if you don’t sit at the right table to travel to the past. You need to sit at that table to meet with your regrets, and wait if someone is sitting.

You sit at that table, waiting eagerly to revisit the past…Remember, your time is limited. Your time in the past starts at the second when the coffee starts to be poured in the cup and ends when the coffee gets cold. This means, you have approximately twenty minutes.

The café, Funiculi Funicula, is run by the owner Nagare, his wife Kei and the waitress Kazu. Kazu and others have to remind these rules to customers who want to go back in time.

By each rule, Fumiko, who wants to win her lover back, is devastated, however she does the risky thing and travels the past. No matter what Kazu does, she cannot prevent it. There is a reason why Kazu is so insistent that customers do not go back in time: she does not want another one’s ghost sitting on that table like the woman in the white dress. The woman is stuck at that table and in the past forever for not drinking her coffee before it got cold. I suppose you know what that means…

If we cannot change the past, why do we want to go back?

Why are we so obsessed with the past? What is so enchanted about past that we cannot focus on our present? Isn’t our current situation – how and where it is – ultimately the result of our actions? Why didn’t we do so in the past if we want to do something different? Or, is our only concern confronting the people from the past and the past itself? If so, what we have to remind ourselves is that we can do that in the present and future.

I read this book at a time when I wanted to go back in time at any cost. It was both right and wrong time. Right because I stopped being stuck in the past after this book. Wrong because…I suppose, I still wanted to be stuck. I never thought I would be reading passages of my life. Before the Coffee Gets Cold is kind of a book that could make me burst into tears if I didn’t finish it at a café. Although, that didn’t stop me shedding some tears.

Without a doubt, the reason why we cannot get over our past is that our desire to make the past our future. We believe, if we pour out what’s inside us will make everything better, even if we cannot change anything. But nothing is fixed, we just keep on being human. The ones who left our present keep on being humans somewhere else. They may keep on better and we may worse, or vice versa. But the important thing is we keep being us in the present and live.