To be completely honest. I try to block things like that out of my mind. I mean, plenty of "scary" things have happened to me. But I don't dwell on them. Everything passes with time. And if it doesn't pass.. I mean, you probably die. So what would it matter then?
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I was five or six years old. It was summer I believe. We'd already moved to New York. My Mom and Dad broke up that year but I don't remember when exactly. I stayed with my Mother in Chelsea. I was always a really shy little girl and moving didn't really go well with that. I always stuck close to my Mom when we were out or we had company. She had these incredible long slender legs, that was absolutely sure God gave her just for me to have something to hold onto and hide behind. As long as she was within arms reach, I was ok. I was content to play by myself quietly and that's what I did. I had cousins, mostly girls, that lived near. But they were all very outgoing and smart. Most of that year was spent attached to my Mother's side. It was a really hard year.
The man with the red shirt and the gray hat was always at the park by our house. I always saw him there. I remembered him because of the shirt I think. He always wore the same outfit and he had whiskers. After we played at the park Mommy took us home and made dinner. After dinner, she bathed me and got me ready for bed. I headed into the living room to watch TV and she went into the kitchen to clean up. I heard a noise. Like the cookie sheet hitting the floor. Now instead of assuming something was happening, I heard the cookie sheet and thought "Oh! She's making cookies as a surprise!" so I ran into the kitchen. I saw my Mom laying down on the ground and that dirty man in the red shirt standing over her. He had a pocket knife out and up close, you could tell he hadn't brushed his teeth in a really long time. - He saw me and smiled. I looked at my Mother's face and she didn't say anything. Just looked at me with wide eyes. At that point I wasn't so much scared as confused. Then the backdoor swung open and I heard a pop.
My Dad walked over and helped my Mother up, they were both crying, and I just stared. I didn't understand what happened. My mind couldn't process it all. I'd never seen a gun before and I'd never seen that much blood. Once I realized the man was bleeding I screamed and ran in the other room. My parents comforted me and the cops came but we never talked about that again. We didn't even talk about it then. I didn't ask and they didn't tell.
About ten years later, when I was a teenager, I started having reoccurring dreams. It was about the incident, which I had completely blocked out until then. My Mother let me go through six months of therapy before telling me what had happened. I think that was probably the most scared I've ever felt. Not only remembering what had happened and now understanding it - but knowing that my Mother had basically lied to me. That was probably the first in a long line of very scary and disturbing things that has happened to me. But like I said. I block them out. They don't help me. They don't make me a richer person for having happened to me. They don't make anyone happier by hearing about them. They're part a part of life. A part I would much rather forget.