When I read this question, an episode came back to my mind that I don’t often talk about, but that marked me, here everything is anonymous so why not tell it. I was a kid, I was simply walking down the street going to the small football field to play with my classmates, as I did every day. At a certain point I notice a car stopping a little further ahead, for no reason at all, it didn’t have to give way, nor was any car coming. Inside there were people I didn’t like, bad faces, foreigners too. One gets out from the passenger seat and starts coming towards me without saying a word.
I wasn’t naive thinking I was exaggerating or imagining things, I trusted my instinct and my distrust and I started to step back and at that point he started running towards me, so I ran away too.
I still remember the adrenaline and the blind run without looking back knowing that if I stopped it was over, I simply headed towards a woman on a bicycle, running to get closer to her and when I reached her the guy had gone back and the car sped away. Those were different times, there were no smartphones to take pictures, no cameras around, there were no witnesses and no way I could remember the car or the license plate so in the end nothing was done.
The difficult part was after, the fear was there, of course, but I couldn’t stop living and lock myself at home nor could I become paranoid, however it would be false to say that it didn’t change me.
Since then, when I am out, I always have everything under control, as if I were scanning every person, every movement, everything that happens around me, near or far. It is not something heavy or tiring, it is natural, like walking. Whether on foot or in the car, I notice details that others ignore or don’t pay attention to. A recent example, walking with my family on the sidewalk, I saw a man on a distant bench, foreigner, bad face… but the thing I noticed immediately is that there was an empty bottle of some alcohol placed on the ground and next to him the guy had a bottle of beer, I immediately thought he could be drunk and looking to cause trouble. I made us change direction immediately, and in all this my wife had seen the guy, but she hadn’t noticed anything about the bottles nor connected it to a possible drunk person.
Or when I drive: someone tells me “watch out for the one cutting you off” or “watch out they are braking hard”, but when they tell me that I already have my foot on the brake, because I had seen it before (and sometimes predicted it).
Sometimes my wife jokes saying that I have a radar for pretty girls around, because I always point them out when I see them. But that’s not it. It’s a radar for everything that happens, and it all started from that afternoon.
Random photo taken this weekend
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