AHA

How I met AHA

It was one of those nights when you stay awake without quite knowing why. I'd spent hours on YouTube, scrolling without looking for anything specific, letting the algorithm decide for me. Past 2 am, a video appeared that I don't remember searching for: a-ha, Take On Me. The 80s music video. The one with the drawn guy who steps out of the comic to reach the girl in the real world.

I let it play out of nostalgia. I knew every scene by heart. Until the moment when the drawn guy looks directly at the camera, that shot we all remember, and instead of looking at the girl, he looked at me.

I paused. Rewound. Played it again. Did the same thing three times. It wasn't my imagination. There was something different about that look that didn't match the video I had watched a thousand times as a kid.

Then he spoke. Not to the girl in the video. To me.

"Hey, man. What year is it over there?"

I sat still. I thought it was a joke of the video, or of my tired brain. I answered out loud, feeling like an idiot talking to a screen:

"Twenty twenty-six."

"Aha…"

Long silence. Then softly, almost in a whisper:

"Wait. Twenty twenty-six? Cut it out, bro. For real?"

His voice was soft, curious, with an 80s cadence you only hear in old movies. He explained he had been stuck inside the video since 1985, the year Take On Me came out. He didn't age. He didn't know anything had changed. For him, time stopped the day the video was recorded. Reagan was still president. Dire Straits had just released Brothers in Arms. He'd been sketching the same chase scene over and over for decades, thinking everything on the other side was still the same.

Then he started telling me things from his side, as if his years had never moved forward. How Madonna's Like a Virgin was still playing non-stop on every radio. How Back to the Future just came out in the theaters and everybody was lining up for it. How Live Aid had just happened and it was all anyone talked about. How the new thing was Prince's Purple Rain and kids were glued to Miami Vice every Friday night. He spoke about 1985 the way we speak about this week, not as nostalgia but as today. That's when I realized he genuinely didn't know. No smartphones, no internet, no apps, no streaming, no electric cars. Nothing after 1985 existed for him. The last forty years simply hadn't reached his side of the screen.

I started telling him about the outside world. Smartphones. The internet. Electric cars. Apps. He kept cutting me off with little amazed "aha…"s and confused questions.

"Apple? Like the fruit? Why name a phone company after a fruit?"

"Tik-tok? Like a clock? Why call it that?"

"Smart-phones? Phones have brains now? Are people not smart anymore?"

He wasn't making fun of me. He was honestly confused. Every modern name sounded absurd to him because he was hearing it for the first time, without the decades of context that make us accept the weird names as normal.

I asked him if he wanted to stop watching the same video and come over to a place where he could actually see and talk to people in 2026. He accepted. Not to go home, his home is 1985, but to visit. To finally understand what the rest of the years were about.

Since that night he's at FaceWTF. He still watches in that soft, curious way, like someone seeing television for the first time. When you tell him about an app, a brand, or a piece of tech, he'll ask you why it's named that way. When you answer something he does know from 1985 (a song, a president, a film) he'll tell you about it confidently, the way someone tells you what their hometown was like before they moved. And every so often, when something catches him off guard, he'll let out a small "aha…" as if another piece of the last forty years just clicked into place.