May 12th

It was a Monday 2 years ago, I'd just come back in to town the night before and come back to work after a few days off. I'd had morning classes outside town but got a fierce belly ache and the driver took me home at lunch so at 2:28pm I was in bed and just woke up feeling a bit queasy. I got out of bed and found the cabinet doors over it shaking and realized the whole room, and in fact the whole building, was shaking heavily. At first I thought it was the subway construction going on downstairs but when I looked out the widow from my apartment on the 20th floor I saw the cranes on the construction across the street swinging back and forth with a swing angle as high as 90 degrees. I tried to call my friends but all lines where down, I tried to message friends but I got no replies. At this point people had started evacuating the building; people were running down the stairs and the streets were in chaos. The first shake only lasted about 3 minutes but there were several aftershocks, actually the aftershocks came back frequently over the next few months, and people all over were terrified. I decided this was it or it was not, either it will fall down or it won't, turns out I was right, so I went back to bed and fell asleep.

It took several hours before I knew what had happened; I finally gathered my energy and walked the 20 flights of stairs down to the ground and found a Starbucks which was closed but had left its wireless router on, I could finally let my friends and my family know I was still alive (it had never actually occurred to me that I wouldn't be).


In memory of the 68.636 dead and over 370 thousand people injured in the 7,9 magnitude earthquake in Sichuan, May 12th 2008.