Ring! Ring! Ring!

6:00 AM. The alarm from the cheap smartphone no longer sounded like an adrenaline-pumping opening bell for a gladiatorial arena. To Arif, the ringing now transformed into the strike of a judge's gavel handing down a life sentence inside an invisible solitary cell.

Arif didn't move right away. He remained lying flat on his thin mattress, staring up at the moldy ceiling of his room with dull, sunken eyes. He didn't even bother turning off the alarm until it blared for the third time. The musty scent of the pillow, the whir of the dusty wall fan, and the silhouette of the pile of bills in the corner had become permanent fixtures slowly eroding his sanity.

One hundred times? Two hundred times? Arif had stopped counting past the 120th loop. Numbers lost all meaning when tomorrow was nothing more than a flawed carbon copy of today.

He lifted his right hand before his face. The Frost Circle ring rested snugly on his ring finger, radiating a cold, bluish-silver glow. Once, Arif had admired this object. He had worshipped it as the ultimate weapon to extort Pak Malik, rake in hundreds of millions, and live out a fantasy as a king for a day in Jakarta. Yet today, the chilling aura bleeding from the ring's surface felt like iron manacles locking his soul inside a void.

This mystical object wasn't a gift; it was a Time Prison.

With heavy, dragging steps, Arif walked out of his boarding room into the capital's streets. Today, he didn't go to the office. He refused to look at Pak Malik's or Bu Sarah's faces ever again. The three hundred million rupiah he could extort in three minutes now felt like a worthless pile of dry leaves. Arif chose to wander aimlessly, cutting through the bustling energy of a waking Jakarta.

He stood in the middle of the platform at Manggarai Station during the morning rush hour. Thousands of people surged around him in a scramble, resembling a wave of ants frantically chasing a commuter train. The roar of iron engines, the public announcements blaring through speakers, and the random chatter of passengers created an overwhelming symphony of noise.

Yet amidst that human ocean, an immensely dense storm of loneliness choked his chest.

Herein lay the greatest torture of this Time Prison. The human beings around him were living creatures moving, breathing, and speaking, but to Arif, they were nothing more than computer programs running on a fixed script.

Arif tried walking over to an older man standing anxiously, waiting for a train heading to Tanah Abang. Back in the 80th loop, Arif had shared a long conversation with this man. His name was Pak Joko, a father of three worrying over his eldest daughter's college tuition. That day, they had smoked together outside the station, and Pak Joko had wept while pouring out his life's burdens. Arif remembered every detail of his facial expression, his vocal intonation, and the brand of cigarettes Pak Joko smoked.

"Morning, Pak Joko. How is your daughter's college going?" Arif greeted with hopeful tones, attempting to spark a genuine human interaction.

The middle-aged man turned. He furrowed his brow, staring at Arif with absolute wariness and foreign detachment. "Pardon? Who are you? How do you know my name and about my kid?"

Arif's chest throbbed with pain. He had forgotten. For Pak Joko, today was his first Thursday. A Thursday where he had never met, smoked, or cried before a young man named Arif. Every ounce of emotional closeness, empathy, and tears they shared in the previous loop had been completely erased from the world's timeline, leaving Arif as the sole vessel holding those memories.

"Sorry... wrong person," Arif whispered hoarsely. He turned and walked away before Pak Joko could interrogate him further.

Arif continued his walk to a small curbside coffee shop around the Sudirman area. He sat in a corner, ordered black coffee, and tried striking up a friendly chat with the barista. He cracked a joke, and the server offered a light chuckle. They shared laughs for several minutes. Yet right in the middle of that laughter, Arif abruptly fell silent.

A cynical thought slammed into his head: Tomorrow morning, when I come back here, he won't remember this joke. He won't remember my laugh. I'll have to introduce myself all over again from scratch. None of this matters.

Arif set down his half-full coffee cup, paid with exact change, and stepped back out onto the street under the blistering Jakarta heat.

Human connection in this city had turned flavorless. Every deep conversation, every warm handshake, and every sweet smile he received from people throughout the day would evaporate into ash the moment the wall clock struck midnight. The people around him kept marching forward toward their future, while Arif was forced to stand frozen in a single spot, witnessing the exact same theatrical rerun over and over again.

He felt like a ghost haunting a crowd. He could see them, hear them, touch them, but he could never truly exist within their lives. The magnificent capital of Jakarta with its neon lights had transformed into a giant glass labyrinth locking him away all alone.

By afternoon, a fine drizzle began to drench the capital's asphalt, precisely like hundreds of afternoons before. Arif sat in a packed TransJakarta shelter. Beside him, a teenage girl cried softly over a heartbreak, and on the other side, two office workers argued over a project deadline.

Arif watched them all with an empty gaze. His soul was exhausted. The frustration he had long suppressed beneath the euphoria of fake luxury had now exploded into massive despair.

He reached for his phone, staring at a clean screen devoid of any meaningful new messages. Exactly at 6:00 PM, an incoming call he had memorized by heart popped up on the display.

Mom is calling...

Arif pressed the phone to his ear, yet he couldn't muster the word "Hello." He simply listened to his mother's voice on the other end asking how he was with the exact same anxious tone, the exact same phrasing, and the exact same pauses as hundreds of Thursdays past.

Arif's tears slowly slipped down his stiff cheeks. "Mom..." Arif whispered with a voice choking in his throat. "Arif wants to come home, Mom... Arif is so tired of Jakarta. My time won't move forward..."

"Arif? What are you talking about, son? Why does your voice sound so sad?" his mother replied, entirely unaware of the curse plaguing her boy.

Arif didn't reply. He instantly hung up the call. He knew explanations were useless. If he tried explaining the Frost Circle and these time loops to her, tomorrow morning she would forget the entire story and call him again with identical questions.

Arif buried his face in his palms amid the noisy, chaotic shelter. Inside this frozen Time Prison, trapped in a city populated by millions, Arif was the sole soul screaming in silence, mourning the loss of humanity's most precious certainty: Tomorrow.