Do you ever pretend to be talking to someone?

He just kept on walking down the middle of the street, as far as I know.  As soon as I got to my front door, I quickly glanced over my shoulder to make sure he wasn't directly behind me and I ran into the house and locked the dead bolt.  


Seeing the guy walking down the middle of the street last night, I felt a kind of déjà vu, remembering a similar situation that happened to me in front of my house a number of years ago.  I was coming out of my house, down my front walk, headed toward my car in the driveway on my way to work in the morning.  A guy was walking in the middle of the street coming up the street toward my direction.  When he saw me, he started walking faster and coming directly toward me saying he had run out of gas and could he have a few bucks to get back home to Garden Grove.  The hair on my arms stood up and the guy completely freaked me out.  There was just something about him.  He was tall and had on jeans and a dark blue sweatshirt with the hood pulled up, rather inappropriate for this was a nice warm summer morning.  I said, "I don't have any money," and I ran to my car, jumped inside, and locked it.  I didn't care if I looked like an idiot, he affected me that much.  

When I came home from work that night, my neighbors were gathered in front of the house next door and talking about a woman who worked at the drugstore just beyond of our housing tract.  She was walking from her car into the store to begin her shift when a guy jumped her, dragged her into the alleyway behind the dumpsters, and raped her.  The description of the guy was that he was about 6 ft tall and was wearing a dark blue sweatshirt with the hood up over his head.   What are the odds that there are two guys dressed in dark blue sweatshirts with the hood pulled up walking in the same vicinity within 30 minutes of the rape having occurred?  

Only when I saw the guy, I had no idea that anyone had been attacked just a few minutes before.  By the time the neighbors filled me in on the situation, it was already 6:30 pm, hours from when I saw the man.  I debated calling the police to tell them what I had seen, but I realized I didn't have enough information for them.  I couldn't pick this guy out of a lineup because I didn't see his face well enough and had no workable information for them, and I didn't want to waste their time.  I never heard whether the rapist was apprehended or not.

So the guy last night might have had a totally legitimate reason for walking down my street last night.  It isn't his fault I reacted so strongly, but I am not sorry I did.SaveSave