The guy who made me realize I'm an adult now.

Throwaway cause I'm using my main account to post elsewhere, this was too weird not to share.<br><br>This happened in 2005 when I (F20) was 8 years old. <br><br><br>I live(d) in the foothills of the Cascade mountains, in a pretty rural area, not far from Mt. Rainier National Park. This place is really rural, and the nearest town is about 20 minutes away by car. There are a lot of bears, deer, and cougars in the area, where some of the neighbors keep horses and the like. <br><br><br>My family lives on a little less than an acre of land, on a street that is opposite of some woods, separated only by a gravel road. The street is also a dead end, so we don't get a lot of traffic, especially since there are only three houses: ours on one side of the street, and two directly across from each other. One of those houses has a couple of people in their 50s-60s who own it, who have a grown daughter with two kids. The other house on the other corner was our closest neighbors, and they were a family of four with two teenage boys.<br><br><br>The problem:<br><br><br>In the Spring, when the weather warms up a little bit before school lets out, I like to ride my pink Huffy bicycle with the white basket. It was a pretty sweet ride, and I thought it was the prettiest bike in the world. Sometimes I would ride to the nearby cul-de-sac and just ride in circles really fast, feeling the wind in my hair. One day, as I was doing this, I noticed a guy who was standing in the woods on the other side of the road, just inside the treeline. He was just standing there, watching me, and as a kid, I didn't make anything of it. I had never felt scared of anyone before, and didn't have any reason to. I just kept on riding.<br><br><br>Then, for the rest of Spring and on into the summer, sometimes when I rode my bike out to the cul-de-sac, the guy would be standing just inside the treeline, watching me. Sometimes he pushed a shopping cart, sometimes he had a walking stick, and sometimes he just sat in the underbrush. I didn't mention it to anyone because I didn't think it was a big deal. Maybe he liked watching the trees grow or something. <br><br><br>I didn't mention it to anyone until the summer, when my grandma came to visit. One day, I was playing in the front yard, and he was sitting on the ground just inside the woods. My grandma asked me who he was, and I said some guy who watches me sometimes. Then she asked my parents about it at dinner, and they hadn't ever noticed him around. My mom said it was probably one of the teenage boys from across the street.<br><br><br>Fast forward to autumn, I was playing outside on the front porch when I saw him walking down the road toward me. I don't know where he had come from, since I was on the porch, but somehow I didn't see him until he was just a few houses away. I watched him get closer, and as he did, I started to feel really scared. He was walking at a steady, slow pace, but he seemed to be moving more quickly than that. When he was about 2 houses away, I ran inside to tell my dad. I didn't see him again for the rest of the day, and by that evening, I had forgotten all about him. <br><br><br>I had dinner and went to bed around 9 PM, when it was already dark out. I didn't have any curtains in my window, and I always left it cracked open so I could hear the crickets. At some point during the night, I had this awful feeling of being watched. I'm a very stubborn person, so I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep, thinking that if I ignored it, it would go away. I did this a few times, and finally I opened my eyes to look at the window. That's when I saw a face staring back at me.<br><br><br>He was standing just outside my bedroom window, where the blinds were open, staring at me. It scared the shit out of me, to say the least. My whole body froze, my heart started racing, and I couldn't even say anything. I closed my eyes again, and when I opened them, he was gone. Again, I ignored it, and tried to go back to sleep. <br><br><br>The next morning, I told my dad about it, and he was really concerned. He told me to tell him if I ever saw the guy around again, and to stop ignoring it, since it was getting to be a problem. I agreed, since I didn't want to feel that scared feeling again. <br><br><br>Then, a few days later, I was playing outside with some Legos in the front yard. My dad was inside the house, and I remember wishing that he would come out, but he didn't. I was sitting on the porch with the Legos, facing away from the street. All of a sudden, I felt a presence, like someone had walked up right behind me. I turned to see him standing on the porch, just behind me where I couldn't see him, less than 6 feet away. I don't know how he got there because I was facing the yard, and he was behind me, but there he was. I just remember feeling my whole body lock up. I couldn't move, I couldn't look away, I couldn't even make a sound. <br><br><br>One of my friends was driving down the street at that time, and when she saw me and the guy on the porch, she pulled over and honked the horn. Startled, I jumped up and ran into the house, where I hid under my bed until my dad came to look for me. <br><br><br>I didn't see the guy for the rest of the year. It started snowing in November, so I didn't ride my bike anymore after that. The following year, in Spring, I started riding again, but this time I didn't see the guy. That is, not until I saw him walking down the road toward me. I rode my bike as fast as I could to my neighbor's house across the street, and hid behind some bushes to watch him as he walked down the street. <br><br><br>I had almost forgotten how scary the feeling was until I saw him again. This time, however, I felt different. My whole body didn't lock up, and I wasn't frozen in place. I didn't feel that scared feeling, where I couldn't even move. I felt something else entirely, something that I couldn't describe until recently. <br><br><br>It wasn't until I was an adult, and telling the story of what happened, that I realized the guy had made me stop being a kid. The way I felt when I hid behind the bushes wasn't fear, it was wariness. It was like the feeling you get when you see a bear on the side of the road as you're driving by, where you're alert and ready to react, but not necessarily scared. It was the first time I had ever felt like an adult, and it happened in an instant. <br><br><br>I told my dad about it again, and this time when I described the guy, he was familiar with the description. The guy who lived across the street, in the house diagonal to ours, had seen the man around before too. He turned out to be a mentally ill guy who lived with his father in the house across the street. My neighbor said the guy was "slow" and that he had tried to talk to him a few times, but he didn't make any sense. His father was the one who owned that house, and he apologized to my dad for his son's behavior. <br><br><br>After that, I stopped riding my bike out to the cul-de-sac. It wasn't fun anymore, because every time I was out there, I was always looking over my shoulder, waiting for that familiar feeling that never came. The guy never bothered me again after that, and I never felt scared like that again. I just felt jaded, like I had lost something important. I never felt like a kid again, and I still don't. <br><br><br>So to the guy with the red hair and the smelly clothes, this is for you: Let's not meet again.