The Rewind Diary

November 12th. This must be a hallucination. Otherwise, I cannot explain what I saw today at the "Progress" cafe. I was sitting at my table. At the next one, an agitated woman was scolding a waiter. Her blouse and the tablecloth were stained with coffee. On the floor—a puddle and ceramic shards. In the center of this chaos sat that man. I had seen him before, but hadn't paid attention.

And then something unimaginable began: the woman fell silent mid-word. The shards on the floor vibrated, flew up, and, fitting together perfectly in the air, "grew together" into a cup. Drops from the tablecloth and the woman's blouse flew upwards and poured into this flying cup, which a second later gently set down on the man's table, whole and steaming. The woman, now perfectly dry, calmly opened the menu.

And He... He picked up this full cup of "Americano," brought it to his mouth, and... filled it. I saw the liquid level rise in his mouth and drop in the cup until it was empty.

Perhaps overwork is to blame. I need a vacation.

November 14th. This is not a performance. This is not a hallucination. This is a system.

I saw this man again, this time in the square. A boy ran into him and fell, scraping his knee. No. Wait.

I saw the man walk up to the crying boy with the scraped knee and offer him his hand. The boy stood up; his scrape disappeared. He ran into the man, bounced off, and, laughing, ran on... a second before the fall.

I understood: I am not seeing chaos. I am seeing an impeccable, chilling order. This man's life is a film that someone is rewinding from end to beginning.

November 17th. I haven't slept. I have been analyzing.

This man is a perfect illustration of the absurd, pure Sisyphus according to Camus. But if Sisyphus was cursed with meaningless repetition in the future, this man is cursed with the iron predetermination of the past. He cannot not "assemble" that cup, because it has to break. He has no choice. 

This is Nietzsche's "Eternal Return," but in its cruelest form. This is "Groundhog Day," where the hero doesn't just relive the same day—he relives his entire life backward, again and again, without the ability to change anything.

Jaspers would call this a "boundary situation". A clash with death or inevitability that should awaken. But this man does not awaken.

And then horror pierced me. If his life is a film that someone is rewinding, then what is my life? It's the exact same film. Only mine is being played forward. My free will is just as much an illusion. I didn't "decide" to come to this cafe and observe the man. Seeing it was my destiny. Determinism.

I am Sisyphus, cursed not by the stone, but by knowledge.

November 20th. I found a way out. If this is "Groundhog Day," there must be a "Trigger Day" (like in that movie, Boss Level). The loop cannot be broken. But, as Deleuze would say, a "difference" can be introduced into this eternal "repetition". A glitch is needed. An anomaly within the anomaly is needed.

But how? After all, I can't enter this man's world...

And then it dawned on me: I'm not just observing. I'm writing his life. I don't know how, but I feel it. This diary is not a report. It's a script. I am the Demiurge, locked in a room with a typewriter. This man is my hero. And I must reach him. I must force him to see the "boundary situation".

Tomorrow he will go to the kiosk, hand the vendor a read newspaper, and take back the money he paid for it. I know. Because I wrote it.

November 21st. The Climax. I am sitting in the same cafe. The man approaches the newspaper kiosk. I begin writing:

"...He approaches the kiosk, hands the vendor the read newspaper, and takes back the coins. Then he sits on the bench and looks at the blank sheet of paper, which slowly fills with text before his eyes. He 'reads'..."

My heart is pounding. I am the Demiurge, I am Sisyphus, pushing my stone to the peak of awareness.

I strike the word into the man's reality.

"...He reaches the last column. And sees a word that shouldn't be there. A word that doesn't appear with the rest of the text, but was already there. One word: WAKE UP."

I look at this man through the cafe window. He is frozen, looking at the newspaper. He looks not at the text, but at that single word. The man raises his head and looks around for the first time. He is looking for... He is looking for me.

I did it. I broke the loop.

---

That man (let's call him N0) was almost free. I (N1) leaned back in my chair. Mission accomplished. Triumphant, I looked up from the diary and glanced at the mirrored cafe window where I was sitting, and saw my own reflection in it.

At that moment, I felt a gaze upon me. I looked at the building opposite: in a window, identical to mine... sat another observer (N2).

My reflection wasn't looking at me, but at the newspaper lying on my table. Under the headline "Evening News," I saw one word... "WAKE UP".

N2... looked at me. In his hands was the same black diary.

Cold seized my back. My hand with the pen froze over the diary. Did I just... erase this word? I slowly looked at my palms. Ink from my fingertips slowly, against all logic, was absorbed back into the pen cartridge. Meanwhile, N2 was quickly writing something, his lips moving, repeating my thoughts.

And I understood: "The observer and the observed were one. I was only a participant in his experiment. My brilliant idea—'I am the author!', my 'intervention,' my word 'WAKE UP'...—all of it was not mine".

I looked at N2 in horror. He tore his eyes from his diary and stared with the same chilling dread... over my shoulder, at the window behind my back. He saw N3.