Growing Up Without Forgetting: minisode 3: TOMORROW and The Little Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (1943) is a story about growing up without losing sight of what makes life meaningful. Beneath its deceptively simple tale of a young prince travelling between planets lies a meditation on love, loneliness, responsibility, memory and the invisible bonds that make one person unique to another. More than eighty years later, those ideas provide an important literary framework for TXT’s minisode 3: TOMORROW.

Released after The Name Chapter, TOMORROW finds TXT’s coming-of-age story at a turning point. The fantasy of childhood has already been left behind and reality accepted, however difficult it may be. Yet rather than continuing forwards by abandoning the past entirely, the album asks whether growing up can also mean recognising what from that past is still worth carrying with you.

At the centre of the story is a boy who remembers a promise made with “you” long ago. He decides to find that person again and move towards the tomorrow where they can reunite. The past cannot become his home again, but it can still show him where he wants to go.

What does it mean to grow up?

One of The Little Prince’s central concerns is the difference between simply becoming an adult and truly understanding what matters.

Throughout his travels, the Little Prince encounters adults consumed by authority, admiration, ownership, numbers and routine. Even the narrator begins the story by remembering how grown-ups once looked at his childhood drawing of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant and saw nothing more imaginative than a hat.

Saint-Exupéry’s criticism is not that adulthood itself is wrong. Rather, growing older can encourage people to value only what can be measured, categorised or seen, while losing their capacity for imagination, emotional sincerity and wonder.

That question had already become increasingly important within TXT’s story. In “Dreamer” from The Name Chapter: FREEFALL, they find themselves caught between two unsatisfying extremes: an adult who no longer dreams and a child who can only dream. Having left Neverland, the answer cannot simply be to retreat into fantasy. But neither does maturity have to mean rejecting everything associated with youth.

TOMORROW inhabits the space between those extremes. After choosing reality in FREEFALL, the boy discovers that an old promise has not become meaningless simply because time has passed. Something he believed in when he was younger can still matter to the person he is becoming. Growing up, then, is not necessarily learning to care less. It can mean learning what remains worth caring about.

“We tamed each other”

The album’s clearest connection to The Little Prince comes through the fox. When the Little Prince meets the fox on Earth, the fox asks to be “tamed.” In Saint-Exupéry’s story, taming does not mean controlling another person. It means establishing ties: spending time together until two otherwise ordinary beings become uniquely important to one another.

Before their relationship, the Little Prince is simply one boy among countless boys to the fox, and the fox one fox among countless foxes to him. Afterwards, they are irreplaceable to one another.

That philosophy appears directly in “I’ll See You There Tomorrow,” where TXT invoke the idea of having “tamed” each other. The connection reveals something fundamental about TOMORROW: the “you” the boy searches for matters not because the album needs to prove they were cosmically destined for one another, but because of what they have shared. Time, care, memory and experience have made the relationship unique.

Distance cannot simply undo that. Once someone has changed the way you understand the world, their absence does not return them to being a stranger.

Why the wheat field matters

The fox develops this idea through one of The Little Prince’s most memorable images: a field of wheat.

At first, wheat means nothing to the fox because he does not eat bread. But the Little Prince’s golden hair resembles its colour. Once the fox has formed a bond with him, the wheat fields will remind him of the person who has become important to him. Something ordinary acquires meaning through connection.

This idea resonates strongly with TOMORROW, where memory repeatedly transforms the significance of the world around the boy. Stars, promises, names and familiar places matter because they carry traces of someone else. The relationship does not have to be physically present for its effects to remain.

That is one reason the fox is such an appropriate symbol for this stage of TXT’s narrative. TOMORROW is concerned with bonds that cannot always be seen or proven, yet continue shaping the people who formed them. What is absent can still be real.

The cost of connection

The Little Prince does not romanticise this kind of attachment without acknowledging its cost. The fox knows that the Little Prince will eventually leave. Being tamed will therefore bring sadness as well as happiness, yet he chooses the relationship anyway.

This is essential to the novel’s understanding of love: vulnerability is not evidence that connection was a mistake. Grief is possible precisely because something became meaningful.

TOMORROW approaches separation in a similar way. The boy’s memories are painful because the relationship mattered. Longing exists because “you” became someone who could not simply be replaced. The answer is not to erase that attachment in order to avoid being hurt again, but to recognise what it meant and decide what to do with it.

Memory therefore becomes something more active than nostalgia. It becomes direction.

Returning without going backwards

That distinction is particularly important after The Name Chapter. TEMPTATION presented Neverland as an alluring escape from adulthood, while FREEFALL required the courage to leave that fantasy and accept an imperfect reality.

TOMORROW does not undo that growth.

The boy looks backwards, but he does not travel backwards. Instead, he remembers an earlier promise and carries it towards a future reunion. The past becomes meaningful not as somewhere he can live again, but as something capable of guiding the choices he makes now.

“Deja Vu” captures this strange relationship between past and future particularly well. The hoped-for reunion feels familiar before it has even happened, as though tomorrow is leading him towards something he has already known. The starting point reappears ahead rather than behind.

In this sense, TOMORROW transforms remembrance into movement. Looking back is no longer an attempt to escape the present; it becomes the reason to continue through it.

What is essential is invisible

Perhaps the most enduring idea in The Little Prince is the fox’s lesson that the things most essential to life cannot necessarily be seen. Love cannot be measured. Neither can loyalty, memory, hope or the meaning created between two people. Yet these invisible things shape the entire story.

The same is true of TOMORROW. Its most important forces are intangible: a remembered promise, faith in reunion, the connection between “I” and “you,” and the belief that there is still a future in which they can meet again.

Their invisibility does not make them unreal. Instead, believing in what cannot currently be seen becomes an act of perseverance.

BIGHIT’s official description captures the album’s direction clearly: the boy remembers the innocent aspirations he once shared with “you,” decides to find that person again and imagines the tomorrow they will share as both hope and salvation. Importantly, that salvation does not erase reality. It gives him a reason to continue moving through it.

From The Little Prince to tomorrow

This is ultimately why The Little Prince fits minisode 3: TOMORROW so naturally. Both are concerned with what happens when innocence encounters reality without allowing reality to make sincerity meaningless. Both understand that loving something makes us vulnerable to losing it. Both place enormous importance on relationships whose significance cannot always be physically seen. And both suggest that maturity does not have to mean becoming indifferent to the things we once loved.

TOMORROW therefore represents neither a retreat into childhood nor a rejection of it. The boy has grown. The world has changed. The person he remembers may have changed too. But the bond they created still matters.

If The Name Chapter was about learning to step into reality, TOMORROW asks what might make that reality worth continuing through.

Its answer is a promise.

Somewhere ahead is the person the boy remembers. Somewhere ahead is the possibility of reunion. And so the past, rather than trapping him, gives him a reason to keep walking towards tomorrow.