5 teenagers all around 15 years old, in an isolated area frequented by various homeless and drug dependent individuals, at 11pm.. sounds like a fun night right!
So to start I’ll say that this night and what I experienced definitely effected me in how I look at and think about certain situations. About 5 years ago myself and 4 friends decide that we’ll be asking our parents if we could stay out past our usual time (those who had to ask), being that it was the beginning of summer and the school year was over. So we all met up and are just walking around aimlessly talking and thinking of what we were gonna do tonight as the sky fades from blue to a beautiful orange-ish pink color.
As the sky turned dark with not a single star shining (thanks light pollution) we arrived at a school that happened to be having a mural painted on one of its huge walls. In front of the wall is a large metal scaffolding type structure, me being dumb and reckless decides to climb it because why not. After getting to the second to top platform (so 3 platforms up) I ask my friend on the ground to snap a pic for me. After all was said and done at area one we decided to leave and made our way down into the subway which we “hopped” and then got onto a train and decided to ride to our next destination. The train ride was honestly the best thing about this night looking back, we were goofing around in this empty train, laughing, swinging on things, crossing through the different train cars, just being absolute hooligans.
The train arrives at the stop and a few friends are suggesting that we hop this fence and explore the subway tunnels, to this suggestion I get a feeling that I’d be very familiar with after the events of tonight, that feeling is dread. I shoot down this idea immediately saying that it’s a bad idea and we leave the subway.
Back on the streets it seems even darker out due to there being more space between street lights around this area. We enter this big.. park? Honestly I don’t know what to call it, it’s a really large area with a man made lake being the focal point with woods and other smaller bodies of water scattered about in the outskirts and a road the circles around the main area. We walked around in the wooded area until we realized the flashlights had seriously been killing our phone batteries. So around this time I’m feeling a weird feeling, like we should be outta here like yesterday. I keep a calm attitude brushing it off as anxiety (mistake) but do say that we should probably start walking to an exit, which we do. The route we take is to the side/back exit, now in the back end of the park is where it switches up a bit. The back end of the park is different in a few ways then the rest, unlike its wavy turn filled counterpart the back road was almost completely straight which made it look much longer, also switch out trees and greenery with a highway that runs parallel right next to the back road, throw in filth and a skatepark underneath and there you go, you now have an image I had stuck in my head for a good while.
So here we are walking down the back road, as my friend Gabe and I have a dum- no thee dumbest idea. Let’s scare everyone, thinking on the spot we go under the highway and easily find some broken wood for whatever reason while not being noticed (by our friends..) we toss the wood causing a loud echoing bang. We come running out exclaiming that we’re being chased, and to our surprise it worked like really well, they start running down the road and look back and scream bursting into a sprint. So we’re pretty amused at first until the screaming part, that’s when we turned around to see some homeless man who looked to be high on something jogging towards us. I remember he was wearing a dirty worn out purple shirt, we thought it would be a good idea to not run away because.. standing our ground something, but I don’t know if that was the best choice. The man jogs up and behind us then beings walking between the two of us and put his arm around my shoulder and like pulls my body around jokingly saying something like “heyy buddy whatcha doin back here?” I don’t think I responded and if I did I probably told him to get off me. So his playful shaking me with his arm on my shoulder turned into him getting me into a chokehold from behind, I’m not sure how but I threw this grown man off of me and onto the ground then proceeded to run away. This story goes on longer but that’s enough for this post, thank you for reading.