Arjun was twenty - eight and efficient.
His life moves in straight lines -- office,bus,tea stall, apartment, sleep.Even his exhaustion arrived on schedule.
One evenin, while walking home, a street vendor dropped a glass.
It shattered against the pavement.
A man stepped back and said,"Carefull!"
A woman frowned and checked her phone.
A child laughed.
Arjun stopped breathing.
He had seen this before. Not something similiar - the exact same movement. Same words. Same timing. Same angel of falling glass.
No one else reacted. Life continued.
That night,he didn't sleep. He sat on the floor of his apartment and stared at the blank canvas he had abandoned months ago. Painting had once been the only time he felt awake.
By morning, he made a decision:
If the world repeated itself, he would stop repeating with it.
He began painting again.
At first, he painted ordinary scenes - buses, corridors, crowded crossings. But slowly, a disturbing pattern emerged.
Faces repeated, postures repeated.
Backgrounds repeated with microscopic precision. People moved like brushstroke copied from an earlier layer.
Arjun started observing carefully.
The tea vendor stirred his cup exactly twelve times every day.
A couple argued near the metro stairs with identical sentences on different evenings.
A dog barked at the same empty corner at 7:43 pm.
He change his routine. Different route. Different timings. But reality seemed to correct itself.
A delayed bus arrived early.
A stranger asked a question he had heared days before.
A missed meeting happened anyway through coincidence.
It felt like resistance- as if something preferred order.
He is paintings grew darker. Colours thickened. Figures blurred into one another. He began predicating gestures before they happened. And they always happened.
He filled a notebook with observations.
People don't choose. They perform. The pattern sustains itself.
Arjun decided to prove it.
On a crowded evening, he stood near the metro entrance with a Canvas and brush. He painted quickly, without looking up.
when three strangers approached, he spoke without hesitation:
"You will check your watch."
"You will drop your keys."
"You will say you are late."
Seconds passed.
The first man chat to his watch.
The Second dropped his keys.
The third muttered,"I'm late."
Urgent locked up, trembling.
"See? It repeats."
They stared him calmly.
Nothing unusual had happened.
A chill moved through him.
He rushed home and opened his recordings. Hours of footage. Days of documentation. But every video show ordinary scenes - no repetition, no predictions, no deviations.
Confused, he opened older files.
In them, Arjun himself appeared -- walking the same path, at the same pace, painting the same picture, writing the same notes, day after day.
He turned to his notebook.
Page after page contained identical entries in identical handwriting.
Same date. Same words.
I will break the pattern tomorrow.
He is hands shook. He walked to the mirror. For a moment, he felt like he was observing a completed painting -- not a person, but a finished shape locked in place.
A memory surfaced, faint but having:
Observation is also repetition.
Awareness can be a function, not freedom.
He looked at his latest Canvas. It showed a man standing before a crowd, prediction their movements. They paint was still wet -- yet the image beneath it, faint and older, revealed the same scene painted many times before.
Arjun placed the brush down slowly.
He had not discovered the loop.
He had been preserving it.
He opened his notebook to write a new plan.
The page already contained this sentence, written doses of times:
The world isn't repeating itself.
It's repeating me.