Waiting for yesterday UPDATED 이미 이루어졌다

Notes

For anyone who is curious, Isabella bird was a real woman. She was truly unmarried until aged in her fifties, and she really did travel through Asia. She also travelled through the Rocky Mountains, I believe in her twenties, where she met one eyed mountain Jim, who was a real person. She wrote about him, but others wrote about him also, during the years of the wild Wild West. Whether or not she slept with him is to this day up for debate, and nobody really knows because of the way they wrote articles and books back then. You can read her book and decide for yourself. I think Isabella was a very romantic woman, romantic in the sense of having ideals, and I think his lack of eye and overall roughness would have appealed. That being said, one eyed mountain Jim later on goes to be with someone else, if memory serves me correctly. Whether she rejected him and didn't mention it in her book to save his face or whether it was the other way around, we can only conjecture.

The link in this book between Isabella bird and Lydia will be pretty unavoidable. Lydia is, in many ways, like Isabella bird. If someone were to live their life multiple times, as with the time travel theme, they would probably delay marriage. That's just my personal opinion. Marrying early is so romantic in theory but in reality often leads to a sense of loss of freedom. I think Isabella craved freedom more than anything, even adventure. I think Matt and Lydia both crave freedom too, much as they like each other. In high school, he has a heady rush of lust which she doesn't get until she's in her twenties, but by then he's wanting freedom. Then when they're in their thirties Matt is settling down but Lydia is wanting to be free. I wanted to explore that. The ending, with Lydia realising that like Isabella birds husband (who passed shortly after their marriage) Matt kim had literally waited a lifetime for her, was meant to be revelatory more than romantic. I couldn't really understand why Isabella bird said no to the perfectly reasonable candidate doctor bishop. Maybe she thought she was too good for him. Biographers say she was an unconventional woman but personally I think they're saving her face. She was around forty when he proposed, so it's possible she had not suitors before. She was sickly as well. She was very open minded (for a British woman of that time) but it is undeniable that she was just not particularly young. Her books though, even the one she wrote aged forty, is so incredibly shallow. Personally I think she was very shallow, like Lydia. I think she eventually became a wonderfully genuine person, but it took her until she was aged fifty. Just because someone is unattractive doesn't mean they're not shallow. She said yes after her sister died, having been taken care of by the doctor, so it could have been a yes out of gratitude or a sudden awareness of the imminence of death. Why did she say no before? I can't seem to find an image of him but I don't think he was ugly at all. Isabella bird on the other hand is of very ordinary, even unattractive appearance. Even back then small, doll like faces were considered attractive even by western standards, but Isabella had an enormous face, not to mention how very short she was. But it's obvious from her writing and adventures that she was an extraordinary woman who had the guts to travel at a time when travel was dangerous especially for women to far flung parts of the world where she miraculously was accommodated by many. In this book I've tried to understand Isabella through Lydia. Matt is obviously better looking than her and has to go through ridiculous hoops to get the girl who probably doesn't deserve him, but the reason for that is his terrible timing. There is a point in her life when she really wants him. He's trying to forget her. Then she gets the power of time travel and has this huge adventure going on forever and ever. She's sitting there writing records of the past for essays that are written for high school, but she's literally in high school forever. She doesn't seem to spend that much time with others for reasons she explains later. It makes sense to her, yet he wonders why she wouldn't visit him throughout his whole life. It doesn't occur to him to pray again, with someone else, because he clearly doesn't want to be some kind of vampire. By the time she's done having fun he's ninety years old and dying. They were only married for five years and he died aged forty four. I think I wanted to discover, through this story, what made her tick. I think she wanted to be a student of life forever. I don't think it's that she couldn't grow up or that she was being unconventional because it's so evident that she's a romantic woman in her writing. I feel like so many people mistakenly think that what someone looks like on the outside should dictate their personality (and I wish I could go into a definition of personality versus soul here but I won't)... I think for some readers maybe it doesn't make sense why Matt, who is tall and by todays standards, conventionally good-looking, would wait around for Lydia, who is a bit opinionated and judgmental, and (it is implied) short but I think what I'm trying to say is that Matt is so good looking yet insecure that he literally doesn't think at all about how Lydia might feel like a creep visiting him in the body of a sixteen year old. Or how she might feel that he's a creep if he's in the body of a sixty year old. Nobody wants to believe their lover could turn, in the future, into a you know what. He's a decent human being who doesn't want to lose his soul, which one might, if one was forever young, but he literally spends his whole life waiting. As for the storyline about him and Ethan and their kids, it does and doesn't happen. Their conversations move through time. It's him telling her to end it, the time travel. She does eventually end the time travelling, and they spend time together, travel free. Of course in Isabellas life it was travelling the globe, but here I made it time travel because personally I'd rather time travel.

I think Lydia is meant to be shallow and unattractive. Being shallow and unattractive, or both, is not a crime. You can still be a very charismatic or interesting or enigmatic person. Even Jesus was, some say, not a good looking person. But he was very charming, so much so that his followers loved him to the very death. Even thought Matt is 'hotter' he's obsessed with her because she gets under his skin. It's probably because she literally knows how he thinks. Also, how does a sixteen year old know what a thirty year old feels? Even people with good imagination have trouble imagining that.

I wanted to make Lydia as shallow and unattractive as possible, but I didn't want to describe her physical features because a lot of the time what's hot to one person isn't to another. I wanted the message of the story to be that we shouldn't get frustrated when appearance and personality don't match. It can be frustrating if an ugly person is confident! It can come across as arrogant or delusional! You might want to cut them down to size, put them on their place. But even the smallest and ugliest of creatures deserve sunlight, like the hunchback of Notre dame. He dares to love the beautiful and popular Esmeralda, and why not? Lydia dares to love Ethan, and then when she realised he doesn't care about her she dares to love Matt. By that time the fickle world has moved on. Biracial people are still hot, but k-pop idol types are hot too! Matt is fit, travel-ready, employed. He's way hotter than her now. He was probably always hotter than her, even John thought so. If you listen to what John says, he's interacting more with Matt than Lydia. I love Lydia, my creation, like I love Matt. They're both flawed, especially Matt who literally is so dumb that he himself is visited by Lydia as a hot mess, freaks out because it's inappropriate but it never occurs to him that she doesn't want to be an older pervert either? She does visit him once, to show him that everything is going to be okay, so maybe thats why he keeps expecting her to come back. Sorry for the essay. Got carried away