In the first timeline you wanted to become a doctor.
Not for any honorable reason like your folks believed you had in mind. Not in order to save people or improve the world one tiny piece, one life made better at a time, because of your existence and your choices- but because you craved the stability it will provide.
You wanted to go to the field, work for some years- a lot of years most likely- based on the dark circles on your mentor’s eyes, on his haggard appearance more days than not- not in obvious ways, visible ones to patience and long forgotten friends- but in ways that you, who already saw him more than your own family could notice all the same.
But you will have a job, which is more than most people can say in this day and age.
And there even is the possibility of retiring. Of knowing that in your old age you will be alive to enjoy life- for some spare years that seem a faraway dream and such a little portion of your lifetime at the same time- but you couldn’t think about that. You couldn’t stand in front of your reality with sharp knowing eyes- you knew it even then- long enough to cut yourself and your perfect imagined future at the same time.
And then your hands started trembling from the long hours of work, your face became a mirror of your mentor, of the one that had spared you a smile that you never saw again in the first day of your practice. The hours blurred together, the faces of your friends slowly become phantoms of your imagination with every slow “I don’t have time” and “I have another shift to even have the possibility of promotion, maybe later, I’m just starting out you see, it will be better in a bit”.
And the better never came- the promotions never came, the free time too.
You started losing your grasp on your reality one tiny promise never kept at a time.
One to your mother to see her when you have some free time- you never had free time, not one moment where the exhaustion of your body wasn’t a trapping vessel for that of your mind. One that slowly consumed your waking hours without work to cover up your thoughts.
One to your friends, an unspoken one, of ‘maybe later’. Of a later that was more of a dream for you and for them- more of a lie, that slowly became act of glacial resistance to tell yourself the truth. As the possibility of a later, of connection in your future, in your path of life was such a pretty dream to cling on to.
One never acted on, in the spare chance that it will actually lead to ruin and lost connection- that you had already lost in so many small ways- and that will be unbearable for your already fractured hopes. Not that you could admit that at the time.
And then the diagnosis came to crack you further. To make even your confidence on at least being useful, able to help- and your past self would have laughed that in the end the thing that kept you to your job longer than a nebulous hope of escape, was the actual reason most people thought you would be going to it for.
You had learned to care for people. To slowly calculate the best ways to give instructions that will improve lives, even with the chains of the medical system’s bureaucracy upon your hands.
And now you were dying too- meant to die at about the time of your birthday that was supposed to celebrate your thirty years of age. The second big millstone in many ways of a life.
At that time you had called it a sweet irony.
When you turned back time to the moment of your birth you first called it a gift. Your death sentence the day of its wrapping into yourself. A chance to repeat everything in slightly better ways.
Time for realizations was plenty in those early moments where the world didn’t require you much. Didn’t ask you to give and give and give simply to continue existing for a day longer like you had done before.
And the hollowness of your past self was a slow thing to untangle. To even realize, truly.
To see all the mistakes of your own creation. Not the small ones, the ones which in daily living you had agonized over. The forgetting of a photo in the drier. The breaking of one of your favourite dishes. Your mistake to buy the wrong coffee brand that one time- that you still cursed with more passion that you had for everything else in life at that lifetime- because passion had left you long ago for everything other than those daily errors that seemed so important in your wrapped state of existence.
But the big mistakes. The forgetting of your friends. The breaking of your mother’s trust- slowly, painstakingly, in ways you hadn’t noticed, not even when she stopped calling you. Your mistake to buy the wrong flowers for your mentor when he died from overwork. Or more likely the mere fact that you showed your face to the funeral. A constant reminder to his mother that you were a part of the same system that stole her son.
She had screamed at you then. Not that you could remember it. You had faced so many screaming patients in that life that they all blurred together- even her who should have been a special case.
In the end you were the most special case of all.
In this life you chose to become a friend.
To hold those you had left in asks not truly answered by their metaphorical wrist, to help those around you- not the faceless patients that blurred together- but your friends. The ones who kept asking and asking to see you.
Until they realized that you will never answer back.
After a certain point it had become more of a ritual than a question to meet. A way to assure themselves that you- the person that they had loved and that was slowly becoming dust in the wind, elusive and forgotten- still kept living.
You had never realized how grateful you truly were to them until you started making plans for this life and discovered that the people you admired most in your past, even in unknown ways that you couldn’t truly admit then, where those who had tried to connect with you until the end.
You wanted to become that person in someone’s else life. To help someone in the same way that you were- even if you never took the chances given to you.
And so you spend every single second of that meeting people, keeping in contract, recognizing when someone was heading down your road and showing them in the start that moderation is important and that the promotions will never come- at least as much as you could.
You become a job advisor at that lifetime- certain that it will be your last and that you needed to spend it until your second death sentence helping people not repeat your mistakes.
You met your mentor on your train and didn’t recognize him without the dark circles- until he laughed, that small laugh that you had seen only once before, at a joke by the person behind him.
You died- again, with so many more people by your side.
After realizing how much you enjoyed helping people in truth, and that your time was limited but at the same turn so much more than you could expect, you chose, once again, to study medicine.
Research this time. Something to fill your notes with thoughts and theories about your life. About the circle that seems to have control over your existence.
You knew the trick this time. To keep contract with friends. To have people close to you. To not get buried in your work without reason.
To keep a balance between enjoyment and work. Needed work in order to hope to discover the reason for your continual existence.
But you always seem to be grasping at time. To not have enough even with your technically infinite one.
To have friends that once upon a lifetime you considered brothers become distant figures that you had difficulty approaching without uttering long since said secrets, promises and memories that they didn’t hold.
That they didn’t have. Not in this life.
It is so difficult to try to connect again with someone when you once knew them better than your own heart but they don’t even know you. When you see their mirrors and not their current form.
You died from overwork at 24 trying to escape reality, again- early graduation went for nothing in the end.
In the fourth, the one that felt more like a curse than a blessing at the early moments, you started writing.
Of doctors that do everything to help people. Of friends that keep their promises and loyalty eternal hold upon their heart. Of mentors with smiles hidden, until they find happiness in losing the chains of their duties.
Of people realizing their mistakes in time to make their life better.
Of what you knew and wished for others to see sooner than you had. Even if the world itself didn’t allow for much change.
Until suddenly- before you even had the time to publish your books, filled with all your dreams and hopes for people young and old, you were diagnosed at your 18 birthday, of that same choking bloody disease that had never been seen before. That no one could tell you anything about.
That they didn’t have enough time to even hope to study it.
You died with your hopes burning to ash.
Your mentor was in the same room as you in the hospital this time, both of you with the same strange disease.
He was older by ten years but you died at the same time.
Notes: I wanted to keep the basic concept but basically have the time loops become shorter every time he tries to change his fate in a big way, based on how big the change is in the next one he losses even more time. His mentor is in the time loops too but they had a chance to talk to each other only when they didn't have more time, not really. I wanted to write something sad for a chance! Hope someone liked this <333 (feel free to ask questions about anything)
