Walking home from Bangi Station this afternoon, as we rounded one of the nearby apartment blocks to the Choi's, there was a crack of wood breaking up ahead. To me it sounded like an electrical crack, a main shorting out. The girl just ahead of us stopped. She turned, saw me and asked "Was that a person?" - I made a face as if to say "I doubt it" and kept moving. Ji-Young urged us to stop but we kept going and as we got closer I saw the branch of the tree was snapped, hanging loose like a broken limb. In the garden bed below was a body. My immediate thought was to stop, that a cleaner or maintenance person had fallen from the roof and they were definitely dead. We got closer, we saw it was a girl with branches tangled over her and lying, leg cocked up, in the slightly muddy earth of the apartment garden. I turned, ran back and said "call an ambulance." Ji-Young and the stranger stood back, 20 metres or so, frightened to come nearer.

I ran back - the girl looked dead. I didn't know how far she had fallen, or what she had landed on. She was just a heap of limbs and flesh lying there. Dai and I shed our jackets - she was wearing only black tights, colourful socks,  and a nectarine-coloured blouse. She still had a pair of glasses on her head. Her eyes were rolled right back and her face was pale.

Not knowing what to do, Dai knelt down to hold her hand and I called for blankets. We checked, she was still breathing, her chest visibly rising and falling under our jackets laid over her near-lifeless silhouette. She lay there for a while, not moving and her face slowly going paler and paler. Eventually her eyes opened, they moved. By now we'd stripped to our t-shirts, all our layers over her. Nobody brought blankets. Some passers-by stopped, others looked and moved on. Still nobody brought blankets. A police car eventually arrived, the officer didn't touch her but took photos and asked her some questions - "Did you fall?" "Were you home alone?" She murmured some answers, barely audible. An ambulance came soon after, maybe five minutes. The paramedics checked her first, a pulse, waking her up. They got a stretcher and with some difficulty the three of us - medic, Dai and I got her onto it. The medic forcefully put her on, tying the straps over her and trying to force her leg around to fit onto the stretcher. She didn't move or protest the whole time.

I found myself trying to find anything to do. Throughout this whole event I felt so helpless, unable to do anything.

They took her into the back of the ambulance, just as I think her mother showed up. Instantly the mother was all noise and tears, holding her daughters' hand and wailing as they took her daughter away.

Dai says he has her eyes as they opened in his head. I have the crack of the wood, and I can still see the criss-cross of dirt, scratches and stretch marks over the girl's hip, both burnt into my brain.

I don't know why she did it or what has happened, whether she lived, or is injured, broken limbs, internal injuries or paraplegia, or if she's fine. I don't know what circumstances she was in or under, but it seemed like she timed her "jump" to coincide with her mother getting back from work - seemingly and chillingly so her mother would find her dead daughter. Ji-Young suggested it was because she had a bad family life or something about her family forced her to do it. In any case she seemed unprepared. The glasses still on her head said a bit.
She was lucky? Is lucky even correct in these circumstances? That she hit the branch to slow her fall, and that the ground was recently snowy and damp and this absorbed her weight as she hit the ground. The crater she left was about 10 centimetres deep.

There was something still so shockingly final and unpreventable about her act. I was reminded of a Sam Harris quote I was reading just a few days ago on the way into Korea.

"We live in a world where all things, good and bad, are finally destroyed by change. The world sustains us, it would seem, only to devour us at its leisure. Parents lose their children and children their parents. Husbands and wives are separated in an instant, never to meet again. Friends part company in haste, without knowing that it will be for the  last time. This life, when viewed with a broad glance, presents little more than a vast spectacle of loss."