What can life certainly guarantee you? Grief?  Joy? Fear?  How about scraping your knee after coming to a descent off your shining, cherry red-bike and worrying your mother might find out because you weren't wearing your helmet? Or just lazily bonking your head on your door on a school day, thinking that you’ve walked into the classroom in your pajamas?  Now let’s sprinkle a life and death situation into the mix, like a hand gripping at your heart when you are stuck in a broken elevator mid-floor with about seven to eight other people? That's happened to me at a time and scarred me for life with a fear for elevators.

It was a seemingly ordinary day in Turkey, the breeze at its softest, the birds on their way. We were a group of seven, walking to a party, my aunt holding cake. As we approached the short marble cladded apartment building, we noticed a relative standing in the center of the fork of two hallways, and he joined us. He had been at the fork for a couple minutes, waiting for our arrival. As he led us to the set of elevators, we looked at the elevator apprehensively, and we looked at him cautiously, for the fact the the elevators looked more like ancient boxes, and what raised our suspicions more was the fact that we all noticed the weight limit of five hundred pounds. Anyone with common sense would know that that elevator wouldn’t be able to hold six of us, but too bad one of us did not have that. We then figured that one person had to get on the other elevator for it to work properly.

We all begged and begged our uncle to get on the other elevator because he was the one that weighed over two hundred ten pounds. But no, he insisted that we all go together, so we did, and that was the worst choice we made that whole month. We pressed the the sixth floor. And right when we were mid-way through the third and fourth floor, disaster struck.

First the lights start to flicker so quickly that for some people, it came and went like the breeze, but “fortunate” for me, I was able to see the on and off of those antique lights. Finally when everybody noticed the flickering of those ancient lights, heart beats started going off the scale. Then the elevator slowed, and slowed, and slowed, and slowed, until it came to a jerking stop. People started freaking out, and for no reason known whatsoever my little brother said, “Yay! Party!” Meanwhile my cousin, my other relatives and I stopped and started the deep breathing process. And in minutes flat people were murmuring tentatively so much that the box was buzzing with words, and I was one of them, talking. So we were at that moment stuck in a decaying metal box with no idea of what to do and absolutely nothing to do. About ten minutes in we had discovered that we could open the door for fresh air, but the downside of that was the fact that there was a gap between the elevator and the yearly aged brick wall, big enough for my uncle to fall through. And then about twenty minutes in, we had managed to turn on the AC, giving us some fresh air.

Some smart guy (our host) found out that the screen on one wall could turn on, and there was a phone option, a pictures option, an emergency option, and a video option, and that same guy opened the video option, and it showed photos of flowers; we weren’t able to bring it back to the main screen.

About one hour in, the people had partially fixed the elevator enough that the elevator door wouldn’t open, and when we reached the hour seven mark, the elevator slid about a fourth of a floor; that’s when things got scary. The elevator violently jerked, and then we were airborne. The elevator was falling back down all three floors and down into the basement at speeds about over ten miles per hour. When we landed, chaos thought to take part. The elevator door had broken back open; there it was, the emergency basement door, but the downside, the handle was on the other side. Seconds later someone I had yet to meet had yanked open the door from the other side of him, and many others started pulling us out of the cage that had let a fear of elevators dawn over us.

In life, people predict, people infer, but people can not tell the future. Those ¨future tellers¨ you see at the fair are just baloney. Anything can happen anytime, anywhere; out of the blue you might win the lottery, or find out that a dear relative tragically passed away. I never knew that I would ever get stuck in that elevator, or manage to get out of it in one piece. One second you're okay and not suspecting a thing, and then bam, you have a scar on your soul that will last ‘till it lasts. Here’s a lesson; don’t let your guard down, no matter where or when, because something just might just happen like one in a million.

-Berkay Turan