timeloopstimeloopstimeloopstimeloopstimeloops

April 12, 2025

Some call it Groundhog’s Day.

Others refer to it as vuja dé.

I know it as a time loop.

How?

Because I have died 352 times.

And counting.

I wake up every morning. It is a Thursday. It always is a Thursday. I will be dead at 6:19pm tonight. I will get shot. No matter what I do to avoid my death, I will still die. I may be able to change the intangibles, but never the outcome.

I eat breakfast at a diner. The waitress drops my bottle of ketchup and I always catch it, all without looking. The orders of the patrons never change.

I walk from the diner to the hardware store. I have their prices memorized. No one believes me as I answer the patrons questions without being asked. Normally, someone like me would receive an offer of employment for being so helpful. I receive a threat of trespass for being so creepy.

By noon, I entered the movie theater. I have seen “12 Monkeys” more times than I can count. Brad Pitt should have won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Bruce Willis should have at least been nominated.

IMHO.

After mouthing the entire script, by heart, I leave to go back to the diner for dinner. I will encounter the same woman without the strength to open the door for herself. I will mimic the conversation between the father and son about him joining the army. The cook needs to take a shower before work. The table has the stickiness of grape jam that needs to be cleaned.

I place my order and begin counting. My food hits the table exactly at 5:13pm. Always at 5:13pm. Ironically, the food is always great here. It had better be since it will be the last food I will ever enjoy.

At 6:01pm, I will leave, not by choice, but by compulsion. I will have to encounter a police officer who thinks I have committed crimes against humanity. Whatever I say, he will want my ID (I do not have one). Then he will begin interrogating me, trying to intimidate me. Each time, I try something different. Once, I did not move when he came up on me. After he bumped me, he shot me. Another time, I kept moving backwards to match his pace, thus maintaining the distance between us. He was too out of shape to move as I did, so he shot me, claiming I was escaping. Other times, he shot me from a distance or in my back. One time, he tased me when I asked the exact questions he was going to ask me just before he asked me the questions. I heard him call me all sorts of derogatory names prior to shooting me.

I wake up at the same time, in the same place, ready to relive my day before dying.

Until now.

Today, the cop is now my waitress. The waitress owns the hardware store. The man who owns the hardware store is the cop. I still die.

Every day thereafter, each person I encounter becomes another character in this play. Everybody changes places. Everybody gets a chance to kill me. The randomness was a change I initially found puzzling, then ironic, now just sad.

Then it hit me. The only person who never changed their role, but changed their clothes is the woman without the strength to open the diner door by herself. She is the singularity of the ensemble of 118 characters I encounter or pass by this day.

She is the constant.

As such, today, I will permit her to suffer.

If she CAN open the door, I will hinder her from being successful. I will sit with her. I will grab her. I will do all I can to speak with her. This woman is the key to my escape.

I have nothing left to lose.

I send my grandchildren off to school after they finish their breakfast. I have accomplished this small task every day for the last 352 days (or weeks or years, who knows what is true?). I don’t know why I have to go to the diner, I just do. I could eat at home, but I don’t. It is almost as if I am compelled toward the diner.

I don’t have the strength to open the heavy door. Normally a nice man opens it for me. Today, he is not nice. He has an attitude. He is making this difficult for me. Why is he acting this way? While he eats, I leave the diner and flag down a police officer. He reassures me that he will handle this. Funny, but I could swear this police officer looks like the young man who wanted to join the army.

Bear the pain.

Revel in it.

Suffrage in the comforting madness.

Blinded by foresight.

Bleed into the paper.

Gain nothing.

Crumple your brain.

Bite your tongue.

Bore holes in your stomach.

rip through flesh.

Fucking bear it.

“You Idiot!”

The words, her words, echoed in my head,

constantly,

continuously,

every day for the last six years.

Of all of the ideas she had,

all of the songs she sang,

and all of the blessings she gave,

it was only these words I could not distance myself from.

“You Idiot!”

I should have told her the truth and I should have told her the instant I knew.

I wanted to shield her from the impact it would have on us.

If she knew, it would destroy all she ever worked for.

If she knew I knew, it would destroy her.

She would become a shell of her past.

That person you remember fondly until you remember why you are remembering.

It always ends poorly for such people.

She was now such people.

“You Idiot!”

I hear it.

I see it.

I can even taste it.

Her words resonate and permeate my senses.

Her words drive me toward a resolution, six years too late, but better late than never.

I can’t save her.

That ship has sailed.

I can’t save myself.

I will never be the man she wanted.

Sometimes I believe that ship was never meant to sail.

“You Idiot!”

But I help those that don’t even realize they need my help.

These people I target dangle on the precipice of ruin, only inches from despair.

From their POV, they see only their past, maybe my past.

From my POV, I see their one possible future if they are to have any future.

I am an idiot.

But, for today at least,

I can prevent another from joining my club.

I want to cut the flesh of my body off, I look at the scissors that sit so perfectly at the edge of my desk, they call my name louder and louder.

how badly I want to grab them and trace a beautiful design of flowers or maybe make snowflakes.

I shouldn't, how very wrong that would be, oh but how just maybe I could make something beautiful with a bit of trial and error.

You may wonder

And yes, it’s true

I do still

Think of you

But only on the days

When the sky is blue

As it's a reminder

That I’m free of you

I die a beautiful death,

Every single moment

What once now is past,

Forever and for never.

Transitory life

Is the only door held open.

Meaning is the key

To the timeless place we seek.

In the hands of abuse,

chained to a lifetime of suffering.

For you to feel power & a temporary ego boost.

Imprisoned in what is now my private fucking hell—

each brick you used, my pain produced.

The horrid things that you did, left me forever changed & bruised.

There’s no breaking away when my mind is a prison, no matter how many screws I loose.

Fallen to the ground, begging the devil, god—

I don’t care who, praying & crying for karma to hand you a personal noose.

Flashbacks of your actions that I drown in—

of the physical, sexual, emotional, & mental abuse.

I would sell my damn soul just to have this torture taken from me & given to you.

June 25, 2025

This will be my final journal entry.

After decades of research and endless hopeful results that turned into dead ends, tonight, at last, I will fulfill my destiny.

Over the last five and a half decades, my entire professional life, I have been developing the technology for time travel. I have lost so many on this journey, but I’ve always known my perseverance would bear fruit.

When I was a youth, I visited a fair with my parents. I was drawn to the fortune-teller’s tent. As I gave her the requisite nickel, she grabbed my wrist and looked at the palm upon which the nickel lay. She let go as if my skin burned her. She spat and said, “You will do what you are destined to do and I will have to live with that knowledge. Get out!”

I was confused, hurt and more than a little angry at the time. But as I grew older, and found my calling, I remembered her words with delight: I would prevail.

Why does anyone want to go back in time? Perhaps to change a single, personal action one has lived to regret? A vigorous No, I reply. What a waste of such a precious gift! First, the change may but inflict a worse fate. But more importantly, to be able to twist the fabric of existence and slip into the stream of time in order to travel against the current - it cannot be for such an insignificant moment in the history of man. For never doubt, each life that walks upon the Earth is but a grain of sand on a beach…if that.

Perhaps one would wish to meet some great minds of history? That at least has some merit: to learn from those who spent their lives pondering questions that continue to baffle those who still take pleasure in intellectual gymnastics. Socrates? Plato? Aristotle? Da Vinci? Machiavelli? Russell? Or perhaps some well-known historical figure? One might discover if they were really as they have come to be viewed. Christ? Mohammed? Alexander the Great? Attila the Hun? Queen Elizabeth I? Louis XVI? George Washington? Benjamin Franklin? Abraham Lincoln? I do not deny the exhilaration one might feel gaining first hand knowledge of some historical personage, but the gift of time travel would be wasted in such a venture. Change would be limited, personal and, therefore, meaningless.

Chatting with a writer whose works have not yet been erased by the passage of time might be desired. Shakespeare? Cervantes? Tolstoy? Dostoyevsky? Joyce? Lewis? Tolkien? Dickens? Twain? Wells? Verne? Huxley? Orwell? Garcia-Marquez? How to choose? And really, why bother? Do they not all tickle the brain with the words they weave to tell the same stories, depict the same situations, describe the same feelings that have plagued humanity as long as stories have been told?

Or maybe one has a grand altruistic gesture in mind. Perhaps erase the existence of some murdering tyrant, despot, or prolific serial killer? Remove the scourge before it occurs? Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, King Leopold II. Elizabeth Bathory, Pedro Lopez, H.H Holmes, Dr. Harold Shipman. Alas, each is but an infinitesimal sliver of evil as viewed through the lens of time. What of all that has never been recorded but was? Or that will be.

This evening, I sent my assistants home revealing neither my breakthrough nor my intentions. If I am successful, it will not matter. I will be no more.

I have reviewed the algorithms multiple times to ensure there are no errors. I’ve programmed the portal with the chain of commands that will send me where I can have the greatest impact.

Before the egg. Before the chicken. Before the bang. I will intercept that which precedes all that is.

And I will suggest a rigorous and detailed review of the design blueprints for humanity, for the existing one is fatally flawed.