This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Euphoric_Market2700 on 2025-08-28 17:29:21+00:00.

I’m exhausted. Everything around me feels like it’s collapsing. I can’t climb these stairs anymore. I’ve been climbing for so long, yet there’s no end in sight. My mind is unravelling. I’m writing this in case someone else is facing the same hell I am.

It’s 7:00 p.m. when I get home from work. I park my motorbike in the corner, clip my helmet onto it, and collect a parcel from the watchman. As I step toward the lift, the lights flicker and everything goes black. Power cut. All of a sudden, it starts pouring heavily with severe thunderstorms. I guess no lift tonight.

I live on the fifth floor. Fine, I think, at least the climb will count as cardio.

I start up the stairs, my footsteps echoing in the darkness. Before I began climbing, I saw an old man standing on the road, completely drenched.

The first flight of stairs felt normal, but as I rounded the landing to the next, the air grew thick and cold.

I froze. I saw myself—stepping out of the lift with a cardboard box labelled “Office Stuff,” ringing the doorbell with trembling fingers. I didn’t move. I just stared, disbelieving.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. A message from the office: “Due to recession and rising costs, we regret to inform you that you have been terminated effective tomorrow.”

I watched the other me collapse against the door frame as my wife opened it, her face crumpling when she saw the box. The weight of twenty-three years of service, reduced to a single cardboard container.

I deleted the message without reading it twice. My legs felt heavy as I continued climbing, the echo of my wife’s disappointed sigh following me up. I quickened my pace, desperate to leave that memory behind, but the next level offered no refuge.

The scene shifted violently. Another version of me stormed out of the lift, shouting into his phone.

“I have tried everything I can. I have applied for every job posting available. I am a bloody gold medal winner and have done my MBA in IIM and the irony is—I’m not fit for the job. I’m not fit for the fucking job!” I watched myself throw the phone onto the ground.

The screen shattered like my composure. My seven-year-old son opened the door, hope lighting up his face—“Papa’s home!”—but I snapped at him, words sharp as broken glass. He ran inside, crying.

I watched myself collapse in tears on the cold concrete, head in my hands. From somewhere nearby, I heard a mother berating her child: “Only ninety-five percent? What will people think?”

The echo bounced off the walls, mixing with my son’s muffled sobs from behind the door. I pressed my palms against my ears and climbed higher, but the sounds followed me. The smell of cheap whiskey hit me before I even saw what was next.

A drunk version of me stumbled into view on the next landing, laughing with hollow madness as he crashed into walls. The stench filled the narrow corridor. My wife and son rushed out to lift him, her face a map of exhausted worry, his small hands trying to steady a father who’d forgotten how to stand.

A dustbin sat nearby, overflowing with torn canvas and broken dreams—paintings, all signed with my name in careful script. Years of weekend art classes, small exhibitions at local cafes, the quiet hope that maybe, someday… all reduced to garbage.

My chest tightened. The talent that once felt like salvation now felt like another failure. I looked away and kept going, but I could still hear my son’s confused whisper: “Why did Papa throw away his pictures?”

I continued climbing, each step a greater effort than the last. I could hear the screaming before I reached the next floor.

The sound hit me first—screaming, pleading, the desperate echo of a marriage dying. My wife stormed out, suitcase in hand, tears streaming down her face. I chased her, grabbing at her arm, my voice breaking: “Please, just give me one more chance. I’ll get better. I promise I’ll—”

But she slammed the lift door shut, and I was left pounding against cold metal.

My son peered out from our doorway, eight years old now, his eyes wide with the kind of terror that changes children forever. Pills rattled under my shoes—antidepressants scattered across the floor like failed promises.

I couldn’t stop. The stairs stretched endlessly upward. I finally reached my own door, the fifth floor. I was met with silence. Heavy, suffocating silence.

I walked inside and found my son, nine years old, sitting on the floor and crying. And then—I saw myself. Hanging. A bedsheet knotted around my neck, tethered to the ceiling fan that used to spin lazy circles on summer afternoons.

On the table, a note in my handwriting: “I’m sorry I couldn’t be the father you deserved.”

My hands shook as I pulled a folded sheet of paper from my pocket—this very note I’m writing now—and placed it in front of my son. His tear-stained face looked up, and for a moment, our eyes met across impossible time.

Then I opened the main door.

And I saw it again. The ground floor. A man parking his motorbike, clipping his helmet, collecting a parcel from the watchman. The clock read 7:00 p.m. It began to rain heavily with severe thunderstorms.

I saw a middle-aged man go near the lift and then walk towards the stairs. Before he began his climb, he looked at me like a strange old man on the street, drenched. The man looked familiar as if I saw him somewhere.

Something about him reminded me of my son.