Real Encounters

*A note from my bed*

Alright, so I’ve been meaning to write this out for a while now. I’m using a throwaway because in order to tell this story I have to admit some sort of bad things about my mother. I seem to have a knack for attracting creeps, but the person stalking me when I was 12 was beyond compare. Sorry that this is so long, I’m trying to eliminate bits that aren’t important.

When I was young, my dad died and I began living with my mother full time, though I’d previously been going between their two houses. After a lot of tragic experiences my mother became really, really depressed and began hoarding. This is important for context. The house that I lived in was in a rough-ish neighborhood. The house next door to mine was empty and had been for a years, and was only a few feet away from mine. Mine and my neighbors houses were shotgun houses, and were raised from the street by staircases. There also weren’t any houses next to ours, just backyards.

I’d frequently forget or lose my house key and I left my bedroom window unlocked to use to get in. My mother worked very strange shifts (sometimes from 7pm to 7am, sometimes being gone until 9 or 10pm.) I didn’t think much of leaving my bedroom window unlocked because my window wasn’t in view from the sidewalk, and the house next to mine (a few feet away from my window) was empty. Terribly stupid, but up until that point I didn’t have a reason to be worried.

On a normal day, I came home from school (I was in the 7th grade) and made a snack and watched TV. My life was very chaotic, and living in the shambles my mother left didn’t help. I was alone a lot. It took me a while to find the note that was left on my bed at some point during that day. Anyways, eventually I stumbled upon the note on my bed and my heart still sinks when I think of it. Of course I can’t remember exactly what it said, but I know that whoever wrote it said he had been watching me, sleeping and changing, and writing that he loved my body (I specifically remember my breasts.) He said he wanted to touch me. I remember the handwriting-scrawled and not on the lines or margins. It was in one of my own notebooks. I called my mother, hysterical and told her I wanted to call the police, but she told me not to, to calm down and that she’d be home soon. I didn’t get to call the police then, my mother didn’t want to because she knew that if the police came that they would see the way my mother was hoarding and that CPS would be involved.

Anyways, it gets worse. I began locking my window, or course, because that’s obviously how the person had gotten in. But he broke my window, and the lock one day. It became clear that he was playing with me. My mother didn’t do a very good comforting me through all of this. I slept on her floor on a pile of clothes holding a knife for longer than I can remember. I was powerless. My mother had convinced me if I told anyone, I would be taken away from her.

The most climactic bit of this story was one morning, when my mother was in our bathroom (on the other side of the house from my bedroom) my mom saw someone behind her looking into the window from the mirror and turned around and punched the window. She only got through one pane of glass and I heard the commotion. She ran outside and found that the man had been standing on a plastic chair from my backyard in order to see inside. He’d gotten away before either of us had gotten outside. Again, I was hysterical and to calm me down my mother tried to tell me that it was probably some young neighborhood boy who was just messing with me. I never believed her for a second though.

After this though, it seemed that things stopped happening. I don’t know if he was scared off or if our preventative measures were working, I honestly don’t know why. Through all of this, I resented my mother for being selfish and not taking the time to confront her problem with hoarding. She could have cleaned (though it took us months when we eventually did) and filed police reports or we could have moved away. I hated that I was isolated and that I couldn’t tell anyone. I didn’t tell anyone for years. I lived with so much anxiety and distrust for people, and for years I was truly miserable.

This all has a decent ending though. I was safe, and my mother too, and our lives ended up changing for the better. I’ve forgiven her for this, we just never really talked about it. I live in another state now, in college, working, and I think I'm fairly well adjusted considering. So, yea. I just wanted to get this off my chest. Thanks for reading.