The Saints We Made Ourselves

It happened on a Tuesday. Or maybe a Thursday. I knew it was a day that started with a T. One of those in-between days that never quite earns its own memory. I was halfway down when the door above me slammed open. A voice called out, “Wait—don’t slip.” Then footsteps. He appeared two landings up — breathless, hair damp, laughing at something I hadn’t said. Not handsome, exactly, but composed. I found myself looking anyway.

“Umbrella?” he asked, holding up a broken one.
“Lost cause,” I said. He looked at my soaked skirt, my hair plastered to my face, and said, “Then maybe a change of clothes.”

That should have annoyed me. It didn’t. His tone wasn’t flirtatious so much as observational, as though he’d accidentally stepped into my story mid-sentence and was trying to find his place. I brushed past him, muttering something about the weather. He followed, not too close, but enough that I saw him smirk when my foot slipped on the last step.

A collision disguised as coincidence.

In Dublin, rain still finds me. Even indoors. The roof above my flat leaks just enough to stain the wallpaper, thin brown veins that look almost like handwriting. Sometimes I trace them with my finger, pretending they spell something out. I think of that stairwell. I don’t miss him, though.

He didn’t stay long that day. Just enough to walk beside me to the quad, enough to make me laugh once.

Elvie said, when I told her, “You really are cursed. The universe keeps throwing men at you on stairs.” I said, “Maybe I’m just looking up too often.” She smiled faintly. “Or maybe you’re waiting to fall.”

I didn’t see him again for weeks. Then, one night, I did.

It was well after midnight. He looked up when he saw me, recognition spreading slowly across his face.
“You again,” he said.
“Me again,” I replied.

He held the door open for me, and for some reason, I stopped halfway through. He did too. It felt rehearsed, though we hadn’t practiced it.

“You never told me your name,” he said.
“You never asked.”
He tilted his head. “Maybe I liked the mystery.”
“OK, lazy.”

That was our first real conversation. The one that made me believe Elvie was right — that every story worth telling happens between floors.

He was sitting outside the dining hall, reading something dense about Genghis Khan. The first meetings felt accidental. The subsequent ones weren’t. We started meeting in small increments: coffee before class, library stairwell after.

In Dublin, there’s a staircase in a pub near Merrion Square that reminds me of him. It creaks at the third step, just like ours did. Sometimes I sit there before the crowd arrives and imagine he’s just behind me.

I still search for smile lines sharp like knife cuts in every face I come across, without realizing I’m looking. I noticed recently. I smile at anything slightly reminiscent of him. A couple of months ago, a man laughed behind me on the bus while I was on my way to the pub, and for half a second I thought it was him. It wasn’t. I spent the rest of the ride wondering what, exactly, I had recognized.

He had a temper, though he hid it well. He sometimes talked too loudly, and even by Olivia’s standards. And he never told me why he transferred mid-semester or why he never mentioned his mother. It wasn’t love, not yet. It was something smaller. Perhaps, recognition before definition. Looking back from Dublin, it might have been the only time I mistook peace for permanence. Eventually, we would call it “love”. We didn’t fall the way people describe it; we slid into it. No ceremony, no hesitation. The days blurred until there wasn’t a before to measure against. He’d show up at my door; I’d let him in without asking why he was there. I even gave him my spare Finding Nemo toothbrush. His pillow was impossibly hard. Mine was soft enough to disappear beneath my head. Eventually, we started sleeping on his anyway.

We didn’t talk about what it was. Naming things makes them real, and real things end. The night before he left, we were together in my bed. He had been outside drinking. I told him I loved him, though not directly. It slipped out. He was too drunk to remember the next morning. He said, “You’ll forget me.” I said, “You wish.” I didn’t forget him, no. I just don’t remember him as well as he deserves. It took eleven men before I could look at his picture and feel nothing.

By March, Elvie and I had stopped eating with the others. It wasn’t a decision so much as an evolution. One week, we were just too tired. The next, too busy. After that, it became a habit. Hudson ate alone because we were rarely hungry at the same time. When we could arrange it, he would join us. There was an understanding, and that was enough. The group chat still existed, technically, but messages were not sent often.

Mallory and Derek were becoming a unit, their sentences starting to share pronouns. They had that phase of ironic flirtation that everyone believes isn’t real until it becomes too real to ignore. Sally was applying for summer internships and used every meal as an excuse to discuss her “leadership potential.” Olivia was still taking the train from Hamilton, her coat always damp, her eyes always far away. And Lewis… Lewis had started smiling differently. Not more, not less, just differently, like he’d learned a new language and wasn’t sure when to use it. Or maybe it was because he finally took off his braces.

We noticed everything because we’d stopped participating.

Elvie and I had started living together in isolation. Nothing had changed in our humble abode. She would sleep early and I would stay up late, studying, eating, letting laundry pile up until it became a wall in the middle of the common room. We spent nights watching old French films on her laptop, whispering lines to each other as if the subtitles were too heavy to read out loud. Sometimes we’d go three days without leaving the dorm, surviving on instant noodles and whatever we could steal from the dining hall under the guise of “study snacks.” There was comfort in that decay.

In the mornings, she’d sit by the window, legs tucked under her, sketching without purpose. She’d draw ladders, staircases, anything with steps. I asked her once if they were real places. She said, “No. Just the idea of up and down.” I told her that was the most pretentious thing she’d ever said. She laughed and threw a pencil at me. It missed by inches. She had started worshipping my god. We had created a fatal god to live our religion. Unfortunately, gods have a way of demanding sacrifice. Eventually, we wrote down  our final interpretation of the Staircase Theory:

If something is meant to happen, it will not arrive in fireworks or revelations. It will find you in motion, halfway between two choices, one foot lifted, uncertain of where it will land. It will happen in the most ordinary of places: a stairwell, a rain-soaked corridor, a hallway where the light flickers for no reason. Life does not announce itself when it changes; it slips in quietly, disguised as coincidence. The Staircase Theory believes that meaning lives in transition, not destination. Every story worth telling begins between floors, where you can still go up or down, stay or leave, love or forget. The staircase is not where things happen; it is where they become inevitable. Fate does not wait for the ceremony. It waits in the stairwells, in the everyday hesitations that make you ten seconds late and, somehow, right on time. The ordinary, if you look closely enough, is already extraordinary.

We called it a theory because calling it a religion seemed dramatic. But we believed in it the same way.

The night Olivia and Lewis started officially dating, Elvie and I were on the top bunk, eating cereal straight from the box. Mallory texted a photo. It was blurry, but clear enough to make out their faces. Lewis was smiling, and Olivia’s head rested on his shoulder. Elvie showed me the phone without comment. I said, “Well, there it is.” She said, “What?” I said, “The proof that our theory worked for once.”

I wanted to be happy for them. I really did. I also wanted Olivia out of the room. She had become unrecognizable within the past two weeks they had been confirming the dating rumors. Something about their pairing felt too symmetrical, too much like proof that the staircase theory worked.

There was a time when we used to go everywhere together — lectures, cafés, even the laundromat, like a two-person cult of mutual avoidance. But by spring, we barely left our room. We weren’t sad, not exactly. We were just suspended. Between semesters, between versions of ourselves, between what we wanted and what we’d already lost.

The others still invited us to things — dinners, parties, study groups — but our excuses grew too believable. I had become good at answering questions Elvie didn’t want to answer. Elvie said she had migraines; I said I had deadlines which was just an excuse not to leave her alone. She didn’t mind. She never does. But still, eventually, they stopped asking. I never corrected them.

Mallory once showed up at our door, holding two cups of tea. “Just checking you’re alive,” she said. Elvie was half-asleep. I told Mallory we were fine, that we were just “recharging.”

In Dublin, I walk past the pharmacy where I used to buy my pills. The woman behind the counter still recognizes me. She asks if I’m doing alright. I tell her I am. She doesn’t believe me, but she nods anyway. It’s a small mercy, the way strangers let you lie without consequence.

Something ordinary.

A broken lightbulb on the landing outside our room. A noise that sounded like laughter until it didn’t.

The proctors were fixing wiring that week, so the whole building smelled of dust. Every time I climbed the stairs, I’d feel a faint vibration under my feet like the building had a pulse it didn’t know how to hide. Elvie said it reminded her of the trains in Geneva; I said it reminded me of heart disease.

We joked about it, of course. We joked about everything. Elvie had started journaling again that week. She said it helped her think. She said she didn’t want to “waste pain.” I remember laughing. I shouldn’t have.

That semester, Lewis and Olivia had officially broken up; Mallory and Derek were engaged but wouldn’t tell anyone; Hudson had started talking about marriage too, half-joking, half-not. The word itself hung around us like humidity.

And then there was Melanie.

Melanie was new. Sally’s cousin from Kansas who was a government major. She had that easy friendliness that makes you trust her immediately, even when you shouldn’t. She joined our lunches, our late-night talks, and our quiet rituals. She remembered everyone’s coffee order by the end of the week. She wasn’t meant to stay, but she did.

I liked her. She was the first person in weeks to knock before entering our room, and she would trust me to save her a seat during lectures. Elvie desperately tried to like her. She was beautiful in a way that made people rearrange themselves around her. And Hudson, predictably and stupidly, was one of them. Hudson remembered Melanie’s three distinct coffee orders. He had only ever remembered one before: Elvie’s. He never meant anything by it; Hudson never does. But meaning doesn’t always need intention. Sometimes it’s just proximity.

One night, Elvie caught them laughing together in the hallway — a simple, harmless sound. But she went silent afterward. When I asked if she was jealous, she said, “No. I’m terrified.”

“Of what?”

“She’s not right for him; she doesn’t even know him.”

By mid-October, the building was colder. The heating broke, and we slept in sweatshirts. Elvie and I were back to our routines. Then one Friday night, the fire alarm went off for no reason. Everyone poured into the stairwell, half-asleep and irritated. I remember standing on the third-floor landing, hair unbrushed, watching the light flicker. Elvie was beside me, shivering in an old hoodie.

That’s when Melanie appeared, running up the stairs against the flow of people. Her eyes wide, barefoot, holding her phone.

“Hudson’s hurt,” she said.

Everything tilted.

He wasn’t seriously injured — just a sprained ankle, a slip during some late-night walk. She was exaggerating. He was a grown man, he would survive. Elvie was furious — not because of the injury, but because he hadn’t told her first. Elvie always believed Hudson had a special thing for her, a soft spot in his heart. Maybe she thought this because he would kiss her on the forehead when she was sad, or always save a seat for her when she was absent. I cared too much about Elvie to tell her that was just Hudson, same old Hudson, same to everyone. She accused him of caring more about attention than about her. He accused her of dramatizing everything.

When it was over, Elvie and I walked back to the dorm in silence. Halfway up the stairs, she stopped.

“Do you hear that?” she asked.

“Hear what?” I laughed nervously. “You’re imagining things.”

“Maybe,” she said.

The official “accident” — the one people still whisper about when they talk about that year — hadn’t happened yet. But looking back, everything makes sense.

Superstition had turned into prophecy, quietly rehearsing itself beneath our feet. It was one of those nights that looked harmless at first, with finished essays open on glowing screens. Elvie was sprawled on the couch, humming to herself, her hair damp from the shower. Melanie was downstairs with Hudson, trying to teach him a dance she’d learned from someone else. I could hear their laughter through the floorboards, that strange, overlapping sound that makes happiness seem performative.

We’d been drinking only a little, not enough to blur, just enough to loosen the words. Downstairs, Hudson shouted something; Melanie giggled. Elvie’s jaw tightened. She set her glass down on the table. “I can’t do this tonight,” she said.
“Then don’t.”
“She keeps acting like he’s hers.”
“She’s drunk.”
“So am I,” she said. “But I still know what’s mine.”

I should have stopped her when she stood. She left the room. I followed after a few seconds. The light on the landing was still broken, flickering like a pulse. I heard voices. Hudson’s low, apologetic; Melanie’s higher, sharp. He was quite obviously failing his dance class. When Elvie appeared at the top of the stairs, everything compressed: space, air, time. She wasn’t shouting. Her voice was calm, almost curious. “Is this what you wanted?” she asked him.

Hudson said something I couldn’t catch. Melanie turned. “What are you talking about, Elvie?”

Melanie moved first, a small step upward, hand half-raised as if to steady herself. Elvie flinched back. I reached forward. Melanie’s hand caught someone’s sleeve. Someone’s elbow hit the banister. The sound wasn’t a scream — it was a gasp, a sharp exhale.

Then silence. What I remember next is stupidly small.

The sound her teeth made when they hit. Not a crack, not a break, just a dull, animal click, like biting down on something you didn’t expect to be hard. And then the smell. Dust. Old paint. The staircase breathing out decades of itself. Then blood.

Her shoe was still on the step above her body, twisted sideways, the lace snapped. I stared at it because I couldn’t look at her face. Melanie was at the bottom of the stairs, her arm hanging wrong, eyes open but unfocused. Hudson froze. Elvie’s hands were trembling, palms up, like she’d been trying to catch rain. I don’t remember running down, but I must have, because suddenly I was kneeling beside Melanie, saying her name over and over, as if repetition could reverse this disaster. She was barely breathing.  Hudson called someone. Elvie backed against the wall. When the sirens came, their red light poured through the windows like accusation. I did the next right thing. I pulled Elvie, told her she had to come downstairs and act like she cares. I told her to look frightened.

In Dublin, ambulances still make me flinch. Every siren is that night, replayed.

The doctors said it was a concussion, a dislocated shoulder, a minor fracture. “Minor.” The word sounded like forgiveness. She’d live. She’d even recover fully, except for some lingering tremor in her right hand. But rumors, unlike bones, don’t heal cleanly. The doctors were wrong. She still cannot walk.

By morning, the story had split into a dozen versions. What we told everyone was the same:
“Melanie slipped.”
Elvie pushed her.
I saw everything.
“I saw nothing.”

The only thing everyone agreed on was that Hudson had carried her out, barefoot in the rain, his hoodie soaked through. Chivalry was not dead. When they asked questions, we answered them perfectly. Elvie had gone down first; Melanie had fallen after. No shouting, no violence, just bad luck. They believed us. Or maybe they didn’t, but belief isn’t a requirement for closing a file. That week, Elvie stopped sleeping. She said, “Then why can I still hear her fall when I close my eyes?” I had all the answers. I had seen everything. When someone asked me what had happened, my answer was the same. I saw nothing. What I didn’t say was that my sleeve smelled like her shampoo for days afterward. Something citrusy and wrong in the winter. Yet, I preferred it to blood. I kept lifting my wrist without thinking, like my body was checking whether the night was still there.

Some nights, I stand by the window and whisper, “It was an accident.” But even lies need witnesses.

That winter, New Jersey froze over. Elvie and I started keeping the windows open at night; we said it was to “air out the ghosts.” Really, we both just wanted proof that we were still capable of feeling regret. We were still the same, on the surface: two girls sharing a room, whispering jokes between midterms and migraines. Elvie had started biting her nails again. I’d started narrating our lives in my head, as if we were already memories. Sometimes, when the radiator clicked in the dark, she’d say, “It wasn’t my fault.” I’d say, “I know.” And we’d go back to pretending to sleep.

Mallory and Derek’s engagement party was two weeks later. I went alone. Elvie didn’t come. Everyone looked the same. They were all familiar faces rearranged around new discomforts. Olivia was back for the weekend, standing by the window with Lewis. They didn’t speak much. Hudson and Melanie arrived late. She wore a sling even though her arm had healed months ago. There was one minor difference — she was on a wheelchair. He hovered behind her like a shadow. When Mallory saw me, she hugged me too tightly and whispered, “Don’t disappear.”

By spring, the group was a myth. Hudson graduated early, he had decided to marry Melanie quietly that summer. Olivia moved to France for a while. Lewis stopped answering messages after that. Mallory and Derek eloped, sending a postcard from Rhode Island that said simply: We did it.

And Elvie — Elvana Aliaj vanished in stages. First from the dorm. Then from the campus. Then from everyone’s stories. I was the only one who kept talking to her, every day. I won’t explain where she went. Not yet. No one said her name after that. It was easier that way. I kept the bunk bed when they cleared the dorms. The proctor didn’t ask why, and I didn’t explain. I told them I’d donate it. I never did. That summer, I stayed on campus, working in the lab, living in a room too big for one person. At night, I’d climb to the top bunk and lie there, eyes open, waiting for the ceiling to tell me something. But the silence felt familiar. And sometimes, familiarity is the closest thing to forgiveness.