After working a six-hour shift, I left the restaurant and headed toward my car that was parked just one row from the front door. As a cautious person, I get in and immediately lock my doors. I am about to put the key in the ignition when I see what appears to be a note on my windshield. My first thought, "Who is watching me, waiting for me to get out and grab the note so they can grab me?" I sat in the car, paralyzed for a minute. I considered driving home and checking it then. I considered cracking the window just enough to reach around.
Finally, I decide there are enough people around that it should be fine. I get out of the car and grab the note. Turns out, someone hit my car as they were trying to park, so they left a note with their name and number. I was so afraid that I had not even considered the fact that a person made a mistake and out of the kindness of their heart, left a note so I could contact them and obtain their insurance information.
This really made me realize how I often assume the worst in situations like this. Yes, I watch a lot of "Criminal Minds" and have a skewed sense of what could really be plausible, but I experienced a random crime that I originally believed could never happen to me.
When I was in fifth grade, I lived on a pretty tight schedule. I had school all day, church group on Sunday nights, dance on Monday and Wednesday afternoons and basketball practices on Tuesday and Thursday nights. The routine rarely changed. Unfortunately for my family, someone else put this together as well.
It was time for another basketball practice, so my mom, brother and I left the house at the same time we always did. My dad was out of town for work so we wouldn't be seeing him until later that night. Practice was the same, but upon arriving at home, I quickly realized the rest of the night was not going to be normal.
The outdoor lights that typically came on when it got dark, thanks to a timer, were not on. Our garage door would not open via the clicker in my mom's car. "The power must've gone out," my mom said. I agreed, until we noticed our neighbors had power. Next, we see the garage door keypad busted off the wall. Something was up. We backed down the driveway and walked next door to get a neighbor.
Our neighbor peered inside the dark house through the glass around the front door. Immediately, he noticed our back door was wide open. A fear that had never before crossed my mind became so real in that moment.
We called the police and they took three hours to arrive because they were pretty sure the intruder couldn't still be in our house...pretty sure. I spent the next several hours at the neighbors house talking to friends and family on the phone while my mom handled everything with the police.
When I was finally able to return home, I had no idea the scene would forever be burned in my memory. Glass covered our living room floor. The furniture was rearranged. The TV's and laptops were missing. Our spare house and car keys were stolen. Loose cash and change were never to be seen again. New checks were taken as well. The worst part of all...the moody footprints that tracked the intruder's entire journey inside our house.
My biggest fear at the time was that I would wake up to the thief coming out of hiding in our attic. My parents assured me that the police checked everywhere, but it took me a long time to get over that one.
Here I am today, so sure that some horrible thing is about to happen to me because I have already experienced the one thing that only ever happens to someone you know. So what is stopping something else like that from happening? I now have irrational fears that someone is watching me, that someone wants to break into my home and that someone is hiding out, waiting for their opportunity to take a 21-year-old girl.
I love horror movies about the ghost in the house, the possessed child and the haunted object, but horror movies about stalkers, break-ins and murders are all too real for me. I now know how possible it is for any of that to happen to me. Paranoid? 100%. Maybe this requires therapy. I say all of this because I have written a little bit about the millions of things that are going through my mind at once, but the one thing that is always at the forefront is my safety.
Comments