(Rose's point of view.)

I held the note under my desk and stared at the black words scribbled across the page. Never, in the dozens of times, I’d relived this day had the note changed. The same piece of torn notebook paper with the coffee stain on the edge, same rushed kanji written in thick black marker, yet here I sat re-reading that same note from days before transfixed on what was different.

              “あなた自身を殺す! 水なしのバラは枯れてしまいます！”

                     (Kill yourself! A rose without water will wither!)

“A rose without water.” The words written by the same hand, her hand but never before had she written. “Will wither.” I looked at the smirking girl in the front row who didn’t even try to hide the fact she wrote the letter. “A rose. Without water. Will wither.” My heart began to race. I kept repeating those words as I crumbled the paper in my hands and pushed out from my desk.

“Ms. Lovell!” The teacher lowered the book and glared at me from the front of the classroom.

“Mr. Shiki.” The girl who wrote the letter said in a long, drawn-out breath “Rose is disrupting the class.”

“Ms. Lovell, take your seat right now!”

“Kiss my ass, Shiki.” I turned and marched toward the door as everyone stared open mouth at me. I jerked the door open “and Misa.” I turned my head to the girl who wrote the letter “fuck you.” And I slammed the door behind me.

My parents would get the same call, I would get suspended the same way, and my dad would beat me until I escaped his grasp and run out the door. And tomorrow the same thing would happen, and the next day, and the next day, like a never-ending nightmare. I would jump with that strange boy, feel a second of pain and then see all black till I woke up in my bed on the morning of December 17th. I walked through the hallway gripping that balled up letter as tight as I could. “What’s going on?” I walked to my shoe locker and retrieved my street shoes.

Nothing had ever changed during these ‘repeats.’ Well besides the words I said every time I exited the classroom, how I fought back against my dad but every night at the stroke of 23:19, I would be back on that platform even if mere seconds ago I was miles away from it. I would still jump in front of the train even if my body didn’t move. Nothing changed that I didn’t make change, myself. But now, now something had changed with me.

My mind raced with thoughts and worries, unlike anything I had ever experienced in these repeats. Nothing changed. Nothing changed and I remember every day because it was the same damn thing every day and only I had the ability to change something. And I couldn’t even change what others did, said or thought yet in my hands I held proof things were changing.

          “Watch it!” A hand grabbed the back of my uniform. I lifted my head up to see myself aimlessly about to walk into oncoming traffic. “What the hell were you doing?!”

I turned around “thanks-“ I felt the color drain from my face “you!”

           “You!” He looked at me with those dark eyes I had seen every night.

           “Do you remember?”

His face went white as he looked at me “has it been happening to you?”

I opened my mouth to speak but before I could even utter a single word crimson red sprayed into the air followed by an explosion. His eyes widened as he looked at me, horrified and confused. He twitched, pupils dilated before his eyes rolled back into his head.
Pain roared through my body as screams erupted from around me. My gaze slowly drifted from that empty stare of his to the source of this pain. Together, we shared a thick iron rod which had pierced through him and into me. What had occurred? It was not 23:19 and yet here we were sharing death once again. 
My heart pounded one last painful time and everything faded away.

            “Wake up, Rose!” Her voice penetrated the darkness of sleep and those three words are how I knew my day had just restarted.