In this world, time repeats at every negative memory. The people are blue and soggy like wet cardboard, bent out of shape from all the hurtful sobbing over every re-re-re-repeat of failure. When a person makes a slip, literally--as the streets are slick with salty tears--or figuratively, the memory is played back like a broken record at the first sign of happiness. As a result, the first steps a child takes are their first memories of failure, and so on every misstep is just another reason for a person to not go outside, to not stay inside, to not talk or stay silent, to think or not to think, or to fear or be brave, to be or not to be, the power of time has left the people tormented by indecisiveness, as only failure is their one success in life.

On a street paved with muck, tears and blue, a man walks carefully. The man has stumbled three hundred and fifty times. The man has sneezed two thousand times. The man has failed himself more times than he has sneezed or stumbled. The man is a failure waiting to happen once more. The man recites this information in a mumble, and cringes at his memories of past mumblings and grumblings. The man must revisit each stumble and sneeze, each failure and mumble, but it feels as if no time has passed at all, and the man still walks.

Through a shut window is a family of three: a husband, a wife, and a child learning the alphabet in-between gasps of tearful air. The father cries because the child is a girl; his family wanted a boy, so the greatest day of his life became just another example of how worthless a person he is. The wife cries because she knows neither of the parents will be able to see their daughter grow up to be their age, she cries for the mistakes their daughter will make, mistakes they would take responsibility for and relive until death. The child cries because it has only mastered the letter "A", and so much more is left to learn before the second letter can be similarly understood. To the child, this failure bites like a serpent, to the grown-ups, failure to produce an automatically superior child is only numbing, they know there is more to come.

At a nearby bridge, people wait patiently in line for a chance to end their life. To them time reverts to their last failure, and then the one before, and then the one before, these people relive a memory set in stone, and feel crushed by its weight.

One, two, three jump off. Three are set free of timely constraints and the world brightens to them as time changes before their very eyes. To these three people, time is now the softness of a summer previously invisible, time is now the embrace, steaming rather than cold, of a loved one, time is now hope and a joy to relive. Time has run out. The three meet their fate just as their lives truly begin, and their corpses are cremated where they land to make room for more jumpers. If time were to rewind at this moment from the beginning, there would always be jumpers in this world, as there would always be sadness.

Time passes and reverts, time visits old friends for the daily dose of shivers and tears, and jumpers jump, and jumpers are freed. A child watches the jumpers, and remembers seeing her parents smile as they left their misery behind, as they left her behind. The child always wondered what set them off, and with every smile she'd see, she would revisit her first failed steps, her failed attempts at learning the letter "B" after slowly mastering the letter "A". Her parents were right that they wouldn't live to see her grow to their age, few parents do. The girl starts to form a smile, the effort felt like poking a hole through concrete with a thimble, but is soon reliving the fights she had with her family, soon going through time to the familiar, the old feelings that she could not hold back nor asked for, but was given as a birth right by the world she lived in. The smile evaporates and falls to the ground as a raindrop, one of the thousands that patter softly against the pavement.

In the nearby street a man--stumbling four hundred and fifty times now, and sneezing over three thousand times--sees the girl and they lock eyes, the man walks to her in a shuffle so as not to add another failure to his long list, and hugs the girl, protecting her from the rain, and from time. The girl looks under the man's shoulders and sees a world of color, a world of joy where time only moves forward and never returns to the most painful of moments. The girl gasps and looks at the old man, who shivers from a likely cold that would bother others for sure--this was the one hundredth cold to date--and pats her on the head. The man walks away as the memory of his good deed evaporates, and the girl returns to watching the jumpers. Two more raindrops hit the pavement as time goes back and revisits its old friends.