I don’t know what the date is currently for you guys, but for me, it’s been August 27, 2022. It’s been August 27,2022 351 times now. I’m keeping this as a reminder for my next rewind, should this next attempt be a failure once again. In a few hours, she will be starting her day. I have to write this down quickly; if attempt # 37 taught me anything is that I have to start as soon as she starts her day, or else… well, she dies.
Now, reader, you might be wondering why it took 351 attempts before I decided to chronicle my thoughts and my work. Short answer is: I did. A hundred attempts ago, I decided to write it in a journal, and when that attempt inevitably failed, and I rewind time, everything in my journal disappeared. Turns out, when I reverse time, everything I wrote gets rewinded as well. The same result happened when I decided to write my findings in Word, Google Docs, Notepad… and this is me trying to record everything on a subreddit instead. Hopefully the internet, with its permanent nature, will be free from anomaly. I think.
Your next question might be: how did I get this power? Well, you got me stumped there. I don’t know. I only discovered this during the first time I died.
Oh yeah, I should tell you now. I can only activate my power moments before I die.
That was attempt #1. We were going out. I can still smell the diner coffee, the grits, the hash browns and burgers being cooked outside, but we were stuffed. We were about to head to my car, when a guy wearing a hoodie, ratty white t shirt and torn jeans and shoes pops out of nowhere, points a gun at us, and demanded our wallet. I tried to reason at the guy, but he got spooked and fired two times. One bullet hit my chest, the other bullet hit her belly.
He ran. I crawled next to her and I try to stop her bleeding as she tries to stop mine. I kept gasping for breath: it’s like an elephant is pressing down on my lungs. I couldn’t breathe properly. She is losing too much blood. She kept muttering her apologies to me. I think someone called 911, but by then it was too late. The paramedics lifted the two of us and began giving emergency treatment but I knew in my heart of hearts she’s not gonna make it.
As an oxygen mask is put over my head, all I could do was stare at her glassy eyes. A paramedic slanted my right hand that’s clutching my chest wound away from me, and my bloodstained hand landed on my watch- a hand-me-down passed down from my grandfather.
My vision darkened and I lost consciousness. When I woke up, I jolted out of bed, thinking it was a horrible dream. I looked at my phone. It was the same date. August 27, 2022. Yeah, this was a horrible dream. Only things will start playing out exactly the same as my “dream”, and so on. It took me a few deaths and rewinds to figure out I wasn’t dreaming.
Wake up at noon. Meet her at the library. We will talk, flirt, go to the diner together. Afterwards we will exit the diner, only to get shot at by the mugger. Die. Rewind to the beginning. Rinse. Repeat. Die. Go back in time. Try to save her. Fail. We both die. I turn back time once again, only to fail. Every. Single. Time.
But this time, it will be different. If my assumptions on attempt# 39 was correct, and from the information I gathered from her daily routine on attempt # 127, she will start her day as such.She will wake up, snooze her phone 3 times at an interval of 15 minutes, then grab a cold brew she brewed last night, and have breakfast while listening to her podcast.
Around 10:45 am, she will leave her apartment, and begin walking to the library. Normally this takes 5 minutes, but she will be doing it in 10 because she will get distracted by an old lady that tripped on the sidewalk. I’ll have to take care of that: I’ll have to clear a stone out of the way in the morning so the old lady doesn’t trip.
Once she’s in the library, she will be putting on her headphones and listen to a podcast while reading Dumas. She’s supposed to turn in a paper about it. She will usually stay for 2 hours then leave because she’s hungry, but for my plan to work, I need to shave off her 2 hours into 1 hour and 30 minutes.
The library will open at 9 am, I need to be there at the opening. Her usual desk is not level, the short limb only supported by a wad of thick cardboard and paper. I’ll have to remove it so when she comes in and does her reading, her table will creak and become unbalanced. I know from attempt # 127 and 200 that she hates tables that aren’t level. She’ll try to resist the urge to leave early, but approximately 12:20 pm, she will finally have her lunch.
That’s when she officially meets me.
We’ll bump into each other on the way out, and she’ll accidentally knock my glasses over. It’ll crack and become broken. She’ll apologize and try to pay me back, but I’ll decline and say it’s okay. She’ll smile and be on her way.
If I did everything right, it’ll be 12:25 PM now. I specifically picked this time because on the next block near the diner, she’ll bump into this rude guy that’ll hit on her (in other timelines, they never met because he crosses the pavement only at this hour). While she was being harrassed, I have to step in.
“Hey, this guy bothering you?”, I asked her.
The guy will sneer and tell me, “You’re a little skinny to be her boyfriend, eh?”
We quickly glanced at each other, subtly nodding in understanding. “He’s twice the man you are, you dick,” she’ll tell him.
With both of us glaring at him, the asshole will just back off and mutter about the certain body parts of her he would’ve wanted to hit.
“You okay?”
She will breath a sigh of relief, but I will see her shaking. “Yeah. You’re the guy from the library right? I am so sorry I’m such a bother to you-“
“It’s okay,” I smiled. I don’t smile much, but I have to to gain her trust- I found out in attempt #68 that she likes my smile.
I have to glance at the diner at the next street. “You know, I could use a cup of coffee, I’m afraid I’m getting a headache because of my vision.”
“How about coffee and lunch?”
And from here on out, I should play it like the other attempts. In other attempts, we arrive here an hour or so late, letting us encounter the mugger and us getting killed. I’ve studied all the possibilities. This is probably the only scenario where we wouldn’t get shot, or die in other ways.
If I manipulate things too much, I might get a repeat of the other attempts, when we died due to a car accident, or food poisoning, or a freak accident from a constructing building raining down bricks from under us… yeah, I’ve had a lot of deaths. A lot of scenarios. With a universe as infinite as ours, I guess there’s an infinite ways for me to fail.
But I can’t give up. I have to get out of this loop.
I’m running out of time. Wish me luck. As they say… 351st time’s the charm.