The girl's guide to getting stalked

Just when I was getting a blog-rythym down, my exploitation of the internet as the biggest blank piece of paper ever was cut short by a stalking experience. Starting mid-May a man began making nocturnal slow-mo break-in-and-enter visits to my SWF apartment. When I was home, when I was sleeping, 2 feet from my head. The first time i nearly managed to convince myself it was simply a very large, very aggressive person-shaped cat. The veil fell away when I returned to the apartment in the harsh light of day (after an early evacuation to the nearby quarters of a very helpul despite answering the phone at 4 AM friend) and saw the rear bedroom window screen pried halfway off. This was my "The hook was stuck in the door!" moment. And if you have never sat around a story-driven campfire on the east coast and so have no idea to what I am referring: Get thee to wikipedia, go! Try most famous scary campfire story ever.

But back to the truth that is much more of a hastle than fiction. The non-cat man came twice more. Once the very next night when I had locked myself in the bathroom after hearing what I again had convinced myself was an aggressive cat (apologies to all the really good natured and innocent cats out there). The same helpful friend from the night before drove up and saw the man trying to get into a second bedroom window. My friend manned up and flung about the front seat of his truck for a weapon that said, "I am so scary you can be garunteed to not have to use me." A sneaker was looked over, a medicine ball tested and dropped, the strangely super-sized tire iron that hung on a before-unnoticed mock rifle rack behind the seats triumphed.

Said friend armed with said tire iron charged from his truck, causing the man attempting with the utmost casualness to get into my bedroom window to slowly step back, slowly bend down, and slowly pick up his orange and black backpack. By the time my friend got to the window, the man had gone around the corner of the building. Since the only thing more dangerous than a stranger with candy is a stranger caught in the act of trying to rape your ex-girlfriend who flees to the other side of a blind corner, my friend did not follow the guy immediately. Instead, he gave my apartment wall some solid whacks with the tire iron, a scare tactic akin to the ape-behavior in the opening scene of Space Oddyssey 2001. In the bathroom, again the veil of the nothing-but-cats fantasy fell away. I broke inside.

My breaking was like that of the glowstick you bring home from the circus and keep in the freezer for freshness until the inevitable day when you can resist its dayglo lure no more (cause, c'mon, you're eight). Except my metamorphesis was not to something glowy and possibly toxic. A vial labelled "victimhood" broke and spilled inside me. I immediately felt the stress on my vascularity as its smoky contents tried to hide from all my other anatomy. When the stuff seeped into my identity I wanted to retract, every bit of open sapce became a vaccuum for evil. The event of someone completely disregarding the simple confidences of personal space, privacy, and safety gave me the feeling that horror could approach me on any and all sides at any time. This feeling necesitated a lot of crying.

The bedside manner of the reporting midnight policeman was to assure me that petty theft happens regularly in the warmer months in my neighborhood. Though the cases he described, practiced petty burglers perching on the edge of a property utnil the owners were out for the evening and then feasting on dainties of ipods, laptops and other satchel-sized electronics was not the case before us. This man came repeatedly to a lighted window to watch a girl and then slowly moved towards her against the intervening windowscreen (there had been quite a few other nights when I had heard "cats"). I would have preferred one of the laptop guys, but we get the crimes we get.

The victim thing is weird. The third time the man came a friend who was serving as protector, or at least dissuader, for the night warned him off. This friend assured me that I could totally beat the guy up, possible blindfolded. My feeling was that I was powerless with him because he saw me as powerless enough to be interfered with and disregarded. Like when your mortal kombat character is getting beaten so hard that pounding the buttons does nothing.

You are relieved from reading further metaphors, because the thrid time was the charm. I moved. For obvious reasons, I will not describe my new apartment (or maybe it is a condo or house) on this public forum.

I affirmed some things about myself through this affair. Cheifly, that I deal with even the most stressful and dangerous events by telling funny stories about them. In retrospect, it seems twisted to have your friends laugh at any story whose cheif character is dubbed, "my rapist-to-be." But laughter is the sound of coping. The thing I learned was that this system only holds out for so long. Once the victim was back in its bottle, I faced some long dark nights of the closed,locked, and curtained windowed soul. My PTSD peaked just in time for me to take the wellness assessment levied on all employees by my new boss, King County. I got my personal road map to wellness in the mail today and it includes a lot of stress management: "You feel like you are not in control of your environment. Is there someone you trust who can help you? I mean, besides PBR." PBR is close to laughter for coping. But is only equally sustainable and generates a lot more gas.

If you like endings, there isn't one really. The police called me at 3 AM on the Saturday after the last visit, but I was not near my phone and missed the summons to make a positive ID on a guy with an orange and black backpack they confronted near my place. When I got back to my contact officer he assured me that stern-talking-tos had been talked. Well that's a relief.

I actually think I saw the guy about a month ago when I was driving onto the U-bridge. My skin went taught before my brain could corroborate the image my eyes were sending. I pulled over my car and walked up to the guy, levelling my straight and determined eyes at his sunken and stooped ones, in a brief fantasy. Really, my victimhood rattled its glass and I continued on the bridge and then on and on and on after that.