Comfort Collapsed
We live with our doors unlocked. More often than not, I wouldn’t have my key on me when I took the train to high school. I liked that I never needed to. I enjoyed being able to just walked into my home and instantly hear my parents say hello since they constantly knew it was me. My close friend, Esther used to just walk into the house on the weekends, not once did she knock. My parents never questioned it and neither did I. The door of the house itself doesn’t lead to a living room. In fact, it leads into a small and secluded hallway. Unless you’re directly in front of the door, you can never see who is coming in or going out of it. The only time we’ve really locked our doors is when we go to sleep at night. We’ve had a lot of trust in our neighborhood.
Because of the way in which my family functions, I grew up with the belief that people could be trusted. I clenched onto this idea that no one would ever come into my space unwanted or uninvited because that was the right thing to do. I loved when the friends that I invited over would just walk in because it made me feel like I was making my friends feel at home. Before a rave at Chelsea Piers one night, Esther walked in with makeup in her hands, ready to pretty us up for a night of dancing and sobriety. We left the house that night wearing flowered bras as tops and leather shorts in 15-degree weather. We walked the streets of New York with bronzer on our chest, a method our friend Mary taught us to make our breasts look bigger, and rode the subway with the usual catcalls. At the rave, the cold hands of a boy were pushed off of my bare stomach, and a drunk girl left a small burn on my hand from her cigarette. That same night, we returned back to my house at four in the morning to the door unlocked. My dad left it like that because he knew I’d be home late. Despite the fact that my hair smelled like marijuana that I didn’t smoke, and the screen of my phone was cracked from someone stepping on it, I felt safe in my little world and in New York.
Los Angeles on the other hand, wasn’t like New York. The city felt much louder, with one mare there, in particular, being far too intrusive, inconsiderate, and aware. More specifically, he was aware of the fact that we were just 19-year-old tourists traveling on their own, who might as well have been viewed as unaccompanied minors. He didn’t place a hand on me, he didn’t need to, as he continued to remain only a few feet away from me. We interacted for about thirty seconds and made eye contact for about five seconds.
He picked the perfect stop to approach three girls who were miles beyond their comfort zone, a random LA bus stop. Minutes before approaching said bus stop, my friend, Mary, told me that no one in Cali took public transportation and that this wasn’t New York City. I rolled my eyes at her because I knew she was attacking me for recommending we take the bus, but then again, she was right, this was not New York City. Esther made an attempt to reassure me by saying she was glad we were trying out the bus, but in a matter of five minutes later, I wish she hadn’t.
Standing at the obscure Los Angeles bus stop, in Koreatown, the three of us were the only ones there. We didn’t even know which bus we were exactly waiting for. Esther began to look up the directions as we were standing, and Mary had just finished uploading her Snapchat story. I was still texting my mom, promising her that we were all together, going to downtown LA and that she could text me whenever she needed to. After I hit send, I heard the wheels of a car squeak as it forcefully and swiftly put his pick-up truck in park. After he stepped out of his vehicle, he approached Marry and Me, while I was still looking down at my phone in ignorance. In the corner of my eye, I saw Mary take a step back and put her phone in her back pocket. As he came up to us, I expected a “Hey beautiful ladies, how are you?”, like men did in New York City, before he realized we were not answering and walked away. Instead, this stranger, who appeared to be Hispanic and had a black V-neck tee on, proved to have a different motive.
“Do you girls know what time it is?” he asked me in a deep voice.
I continued to look down at my phone, it was 12:54 PM. I was not going to tell him that.
“You’re getting robbed, bitch!” he shouted at me as he quickly snatched my phone out of my hand.
Mary backed up in silence, even further away from the man stealing from her friend. He then pulled the strap off my backpack, which had my wallet, makeup, and sweater in it, off my shoulder. Being the big girl that I hoped to be, I hesitated to give it to him. I angrily pulled the other strap of the bag, as if this teenager who was barely five feet could win a battle against a muscled man who was at least six seven. Four seconds into the midst of our battle over a fake leather bag, he placed his hand into his pocket, as if he was going to pull out a weapon to attack me. Instantly, I released the bag and let him viciously tug it away from me. I promised myself not to cry as he drove away with my possessions.
Still standing in the same spot I was when he was face to face with me, Esther suddenly came up to me and asked me if I was okay. I responded with a “No, I’m fucking terrified.” She began shouting at the cars next to us who were stopped at a red light, and she screamed “We aren’t from here! How do we call the cops?” Some lady in the car replied back “911!”, which made me feel even more oblivious.
A silver car pulled up to the bus stop, and a random teenage girl come out of the backseat of it.
“I’m so sorry! I saw the whole thing Here, let me give you a hug,” she said to me with sympathetic eyes and a very uncomfortable arm around my shoulder.
Another guy came up to me and said me he also saw what happened. He then explained that he followed the person who robbed me and got a picture of the driver’s license plate. Mary asked the two strangers if this is a safe area, and of course, we learned that it was not. We learned that in this part of Los Angeles, the non-touristy part, people steal from you in broad daylight and constantly get away with it. After Mary and I heard this information, she pulled my arm to her and put her arms around my neck to give me a hug. And honestly, I forced myself to hug her because I was pissed at her. Why couldn’t she have been a good friend and pulled my arm for me to move back when he was coming over? Why couldn’t she have said to me “Amber stop looking at your fucking phone.” However, I knew she couldn’t have done much to protect me. And that ultimately, it was really me who needed to get off the damn phone and look up at the world around her.
While waiting for the police, I called my Mom from Esther’s phone, apologizing for not being more careful. My mom was confused about how this all happened so fast, as I had been texting seconds before my phone had been stolen. After she told me that everything was alright, I began to sob and told her I wished she was here, that I was angry at the world, and that I wanted to go home. She calmed me down and told me to really think about the words I was saying before making a decision to leave. I gave Esther back her phone and saw her begin to cry, so I wiped the tears from her eyes and held her hand. We stood together in silence for fifty seconds, holding each other’s hands, in an attempt to keep our spirits up. This reminded me of the time in high school when my first date was so painfully awkward that I went over to her house crying about it, thinking something was wrong with me, a little thing between us that I felt happened a lifetime ago.
When the policeman arrived, I told him what happened, before the random guy showed him the picture of the license plate. In response, the officer looked particularly unamused and unsurprised. He told me it was less than likely for me to get my bag back or my phone, which I didn’t really care about and expected to happen. After he drove away, with the police report still in my hand, I thought about what our next step would be.
“Do you want to go back to our Air BnB?” Esther asked me.
“Um-I don’t know,” I told her with my voice shaking.
“I mean-this area isn’t exactly safe. So, shouldn’t we just leave it and try to have fun?”
“Um-yeah I guess so.”
“Do you want to leave, like for home?”
“No, I mean, we’re here, right?”
Esther nodded and pulled up her phone to order an Uber. For the next seven days, we lived off of Uber rides that we took turns paying for. Looking back on my bank account from that week, a lot of my money went to paying Esther back for the Uber to the Grove and paying Mary back for the two-hour Uber ride to Malibu. LA was making it clear that you have to have a car when you are here, and that this was not my usual life in New York.
Ever since then, I flinch every time someone comes up to me in a surprise. I slept in my sister’s bed for two weeks after I came home from LA. When she got annoyed at me for this, I crept into my parent’s bed. Consistently, I would have dreams of the stranger coming up to me, calling me a bitch, and taking away the sense of comfort that I had left in the world. Whenever I’m home from college, I’m the one who has to remind my parents to lock the doors before we go to bed. I told them we should start locking the door of our house even when we are here, they disagreed we me. During my sophomore year of college, four months after the event occurred, I told my roommate we should be locking our room door when we leave the building, and I would get mad at her when she wouldn’t listen to me. No one seemed to understand how much little things angered me and how much trust I had lost in my surroundings, no one but Esther. But Esther has become busy with school now and doesn’t like to talk about what happened. She seemed to have moved on from the event, but then again, it didn’t happen to her, so why should I rehash the past?
The person who robbed me didn’t hurt me. He didn’t steal anything that I had any emotional attachment to, but he made me wish I had never grown up in a world with my doors unlocked. Even though I’m lucky that this situation wasn’t as bad as it could have been, I still find myself expecting the worst to happen to me. Maybe I am too dramatic for being traumatized by him. Or maybe it affected me in the way that it would affect most people. What angered me the most about what happened is that I wasn’t prepared for it and wasn’t aware of it. Before going on this trip, I didn’t sit back and think about the fact that traveling alone could be dangerous. I was mad at myself for being too oblivious, and even though I say that I have learned from this, there are still cases where I’ve been too unaware of my surroundings. But despite all of this oblivion, no matter where I go, I am always going to feel unprotected and a feeling of discomfort. In London, Ithaca, and New York City, I’ve found never lost this prominent feeling. I’ve spent so much time being mad about what happened, and even though I can say I am done being mad, I don’t ever think I will ever be done being afraid of or surprised by what could potentially happen in any location that I am in.