We spend so much time blaming ourselves for things that were never our fault, never in our control. Things that, in reality, we could never have prevented.
It was a beautiful September day. I had just passed my university admission exam and got in. Not my first choice, but it didn’t matter anymore.
That afternoon, I’d visited some childhood friends who lived in the building next to mine. We cooked, ate, talked. I’d even been a bridesmaid at one of their weddings, so the connection between us was real. As evening fell, I left—they were getting ready to relax, and I was getting ready to go out.
I walked out of their sixth-floor apartment, called the elevator, and stepped inside. I was probably humming some Backstreet Boys song as I pressed the button for the ground floor. I never liked elevators much, so I distracted myself by watching the numbers light up.
5. 4. 3.
I’m not even sure I saw the number 2. The last clear moment was the glowing 3, folding into the melody of Larger Than Life.
I had no time to scream. No time to react. Just a violent blow and a sickening crash. My legs felt as if they’d been cut from under me. My body slammed into every wall of that metal box before hitting the floor.
I stayed conscious through the whole nightmare.
The elevator had fallen at least two floors and crashed onto a concrete slab between the ground floor and the basement. When I looked up, I saw bricks through the doors—and far above, a thin line of light from the ground-floor entrance.
I couldn’t speak, couldn’t stand, so I pounded on the wooden doors. Someone opened the door from the ground floor and asked if I was okay—or maybe if I was alive. Workers were painting the stairwell; they happened to be right there.
I reached out my hands and asked them to pull me out.
They dragged me out of that elevator—the place that had felt, for one long minute, like a coffin.
Somehow, I stood up and asked them to walk me home. I was in shock, terrified, and didn’t call an ambulance.
When I told my father what happened, he said I was exaggerating. Elevators don’t “just fall,” he insisted. Maybe it had slipped one floor, the way elevators sometimes do, but certainly not all the way down.
That night I couldn’t breathe. I lay there praying—just to see one more morning.
The next day, I told my father I needed to go to a doctor. He called a doctor friend who said we could go to a private clinic or to the public hospital—though the private one would cost more. He chose the hospital.
I was admitted to the ICU. They ran scans, put me on oxygen. I had lung and spinal contusions—nothing catastrophic, but not nothing.
While I was lying there, a man in the intensive care ward died. Right in front of me. They pulled a sheet over him, and that was it. A whole life, gone.
After a few days they discharged me. When we got home, I asked my father to take the stairs with me—I was terrified of the elevator.
“Nonsense,” he said.
The elevator in the next building had gone under emergency repair. One of the cables had snapped; the brakes had failed. They fixed it. It still runs today.
And so do I. Crooked, anxious, but running.
People think I’m strange because I take the stairs—even up ten floors. But when you come that close to dying, you realize some things—just some—can be prevented. And you try.
Not death necessarily.
But suffering.
And the pain of not being believed.