He Was Crouching Over My Bed While Wearing My Clothes

I think it's worth mentioning that while this story takes place in a Southeast Asian city with a population of a little over 1.5 million, I didn't always live here. I was born and raised in a small town in the Midwestern United States. You know, the kind where everyone knows everyone and we only gain attention during an election year. Anyway, my parents and I made the big move in 2014 due to a number of reasons, the biggest one being so my mother could be with her family since this is her homeland. However, the town where all my relatives live is about eight hours away. We had to move to our city because it's the safest in the region for foreigners and my dad is a pretty obvious white man.

Now, unlike every other college student in the world, I hadn't done much this summer. The heat was blistering all hours of the day and I didn't have money to spend even if I was willing to leave our air-conditioned apartment. The only thing enticing me to the outdoors were the incessant sounds of construction due to a new unit being added to our complex.

However, leaving was obviously inevitable, so toward the end of the month, my parents and I went to buy groceries. The next day, my mom and I went to buy some things we had initially forgotten, and the day after that, the two of us went out again to pay some bills. That made three consecutive days of going out for the first time in literally a month. To say I was exhausted was an understatement. By 7pm on the third night, I was already fast asleep on the living room couch. My mom woke up around 10 that same night and told me to head up to my room. I was too tired to do my entire night routine, so I quickly brushed my teeth and went upstairs.

I noticed that my cat was already asleep in my bed, which happens once in a blue moon since he's basically my mom's shadow, so I got into bed while contorting myself at an angle that wouldn't disturb him. Cat lovers, you know what I'm talking about. I turned on a dim light, plugged in my phone, and started playing a random YouTube video then eventually fell asleep.

I didn't know what time it was, but I awoke to the feeling of my bed shaking. I tend to ignore movements like this because they happen often when my cat sleeps with me, as he has a habit of scratching his ear. But there was a pretty strong earthquake just the night before so I assumed it was another one, making me open my eyes and look down at my cat to see which of the two it was. Indeed, he was scratching his ear. Oh, and there was my mom at the foot of my bed. Nothing out of the ordinary. She was probably checking on me before her and my dad went out for their 5am walk, as routine, and was bending down to pet the cat. I closed my eyes and was just about to slip back into slumber when my half-asleep brain realized that a number of other things were indeed out of the ordinary.

With eyes that were barely open, I looked at "my mom" with blurred vision. The first thing I noticed was that she was wearing one of my high school T-shirts. My mom and I are far from the same size and she doesn't have a history of borrowing my clothes. Weird, but not unsettling. Maybe she ran out of clean exercise shirts and decided to use one of my mine. I then noticed that she was also wearing another one of my high school T-shirts, but this one was wrapped around her head in a weird way that outlined the shape of it, not covering anything, but just framing the profile.

In my peripheral, I noticed that my closet doors were wide open. My mom always nagged me to close them because she said it wasted the cool air coming from the air conditioner, so I made sure to keep them closed whenever I wasn't getting ready. Another random realization hit me when my brain finally registered the fact that while my mom does pet my cat when she comes in to check on me, she's never bent down like the person in my room was doing. Looking back now, I don't think I've seen her bend like that since I was a kid.

Keep in mind, all these thoughts flooded my mind in about five seconds. Still, my half-asleep and half-stupid-as-fuck brain was more focused on why my mom was wearing my clothes as opposed to all the things that were off in this situation. I sat up a bit and squinted my eyes so I could read the shirt since there was writing on the back that would help me distinguish if it was actually mine and not just one that looked like mine. That's when the person turned to look right at me before running out of my room, maintaining an ungodly crouching position that will be burned in my mind for the rest of my life.

It wasn't until he was near the stairs that I fully processed what was happening — that person was not my mom, they weren't even a female. Instantly, I shot out of bed and instinctively wrapped my blanket around me to cover my night clothes that suddenly felt so revealing. It was only then I began screaming. I hesitatingly followed him out of my room and watched as he ran down the wooden stairs with deafening steps that echoed throughout the third floor, almost drowning out my piercing cry. If I was going to get my parents' attention, who were sleeping on the other side of a closed door on the second floor, I needed to be louder. I stood at the foot of the stairs and pushed my lungs to their limit. I could practically feel the capacity stretch inside my rib cage.

After what felt like ages, but was probably only another five seconds, my parents' door swung open and my mom ran up the stairs with a panic-stricken expression that I will never forget. She grabbed me by the shoulders and shouted, "What? What's wrong?"

I turned to look at her with my mouth agape and my brows furrowed in mixture of confusion and disbelief. Had she not seem the man when he ran right past their bedroom door? It all happened so fast, I wasn't sure if they had crossed paths or not. "Someone's in the house." I responded with a voice that I honestly didn't recognize.

Without missing a beat, she wrapped her arm around me and ushered me down the stairs. "Grab the gun!" She shouted in the country's native language. We ran into my parents' bedroom where my dad stood in the doorway with tired eyes and slumped posture. I pushed him into the room and turned around to close the door, simultaneously fiddling with the light switch so we weren't in complete darkness. My movements were shaky and spastic, causing my fingers to fumble and flicker the lights on and off before eventually being able to lock the door.

"What are you doing?" My dad asked with a soft laugh as he switched on the light after my attempts proved to be futile.

I turned to him with the same incredulous expression I had when looking at my mom. He had been standing in the doorway to his room, in perfect view of the man running away, yet he seemed to be oblivious. "There's someone in the house." I repeated, watching his face instantly drop at my words.

With the door now locked, I turned to my parents and watched them silently, waiting for them to say or do something. For nineteen years, they had taken care of me and catered to my every want and need. Now, there they stood, just as scared and defenseless as I was. In that moment, they were just people.

My dad, an infamous Type A personality, kept his focus on the floor, most likely processing the entire situation before deciding what to do next. My mother was the complete opposite. Her cell phone was in one hand while the other hand was running through her hair so many times that I was sure strands were going to end up in between her fingers. "I can't call 911. It's not working."

I took the phone from her and dialed it myself, bringing the phone up to my ear only to hear a monotone voice say, "Sorry, but your balance is too low to make this call." In this country, most of the phones are prepaid so if you don't have money on your account, you can't make any calls or texts. However, my mom said that she had added money to her account just a few hours earlier. I tried calling my aunt, who lives eight hours away, and it worked. It was then I figured out that you can only use cell phones to call other cell phones and you can only use landlines to call other landlines, aka 911. The only problem was that our landline was in the second floor hallway, a few feet from the other side of the door.

Once I told my parents what our only option was, my mom opened the window and began shouting for help in her native language. Similar to a knee-jerk reaction, I instantly shut the window. "Don't do that. They'll know we're defenseless and they'll come back." At the time this happened, we had been in the room for about forty minutes. I was convinced that if they had left and then heard her screaming, they would come back since they would know were sitting ducks.

"Are you sure you saw someone? Maybe you were just dreaming." My dad said, this being his first string of words since barricading ourselves. "How could he have gotten in? The door has two locks and a heavy pole across it." (A little context about the pole: after the lock on our screen door broke, my mom had insisted on putting a metal pole across the door to ensure no one would be able to get in.)

"No, I know what I saw." I answered without hesitation, but my brain starting dissecting the possibility of the figure simply being a figment of my imagination. The sounds and movements he made were so vivid, but the situation as a whole seemed too surreal. There was no way someone could get inside with that pole acting as a shield and neither of my parents had seen the man. Internally, even I wasn't 100% sure of myself, but on the outside, I stuck to my guns. "I saw a man."

"Okay, then we need to get out of this room and call the police." My dad said restlessly.

My overthinking got the best of me as I thought about us leaving the room. Were there more people? Were they waiting for us? Were they right outside the door? Or were they hiding and would spring out when we least expected it? Maybe they were still in our apartment, continuing to raid through our things since they knew we were too scared to leave? Had they heard my mom screaming for help and came back?

We searched the room for weapons to protect ourselves with, but we wouldn't find anything even remotely useful. What happened to the gun my mom was shouting for earlier, you ask? It never existed. She just said that so the man would hopefully leave of out fear. So with half of a pair of broken scissors in my dad's hand and a small floor fan in my mom's hand, we prepared ourselves for whatever was on the other side of the door.

My dad unlocked the door and swung it open swiftly, hoping to catch anyone out there off guard. The complete silence mixed with the eerie yellow lighting coming from our hallway seemed like a scene in a horror movie. Straight ahead, we all noticed that the door to the second floor balcony was wide open and the screen on the window next to it had been pried open. The first feeling to run through me was assurance. Assurance of knowing that I wasn't crazy and that I hadn't made this up. The second feeling to run through me was pure dread, knowing that I wasn't crazy and I unfortunately hadn't made this up.

We searched the second floor and found no one and nothing that seemed out of the ordinary. We then moved onto the first floor and found our pitcher of water dripping condensation on the kitchen table. My mom asked me if I had forgotten to put it back before I went to bed, but I distinctly remember only brushing my teeth. I knew I hadn't gotten it out. Our windows have the glass on the outside and the screen on the inside, contradictory to typical American windows, and we saw that the glass windows were wide open and the screen had been pried with. However, both of the locks on the door were bolted and the pole was still in place.

We figured that the man had initially attempted to come in by putting his hand through the small gap he made in the screen window, trying to reach for the door so he could unlock it. However, I guess his calculations were off and he couldn't make the distance. That's when he climbed up to the second floor, probably by scaling the apartment that the construction workers had yet to finish, and did the same procedure to the balcony window. He was successful this time because the distance is much shorter.

We called 911 a total of five times and it took them forty-five to get to our apartment despite the fact that the police station is a three minute drive away. While waiting, my mom knocked on the other apartments to let them know what was going on. Now, our complex consists of four apartments, but I'd say it looks more like a paired home with four different sections. The first one is rented out to an online business company, the second is rented out to a family who had just moved in that exact night, we're in the third, and the fourth has no tenants. Neither of them answered, probably because who would answer the door at 2:30 am?

The police eventually came and told us that someone had made a call earlier, saying that they heard a woman screaming for help (my mom), but they couldn't find the location of the screams. They searched the house but found no one and didn't even tell us how to file a report. Yeah, they were pretty useless.

The next day, my mom talked to the people at the first apartment and they were obviously shaken up. They told her that they had heard her knocking but it's company policy to not open the door from 10pm to 6am. My mom moved onto apartment two and told them what happened. The man and his pregnant wife said that they didn't hear anything, despite going to bed at 2am and having their windows opened. I was somewhat skeptical because my scream was pretty loud, even giving my mom nightmares days after the incident, and all our windows and second story door was open. There's another building just a few feet away so sound resonates pretty loudly, making the construction booming even behind closed doors. And my mother's screams that were loud enough for someone to call the police? I was highly doubtful they didn't hear anything. With the first apartment, it made sense because they only use the first floor and all the windows were closed due to the air conditioning being on.

My mom told the couple to be wary of the construction workers because she believed that they decided to rob us after seeing that my dad was a foreigner, automatically assuming that we were rich or something. The man's face instantly dropped and his tone turned cold. My mom asked him for the landlord's number, since the old number didn't work anymore, and he said he would give it to her after he visited her today since he didn't have it on him. It took him four days to finally give us the number, and he did so with what seemed like a sincere apology, saying sorry for taking so long and for what happened to us.

That same day, we called the landlord and she seemed shocked, telling us that nothing like that has ever happened in any of her apartments before. However, my mom had talked to a tenant in the apartment behind us (owned by the same landlord) and she said that she knows of at least three people in her complex who have had their place broken into. Later, the maintenance man came to inspect our window and we found out that the construction workers were hired because they're all members of our landlord's church, and the man who just moved in with his wife is the bishop of their church. Before my mom could even bring up her theory, the maintenance man told her that he was convinced it was the construction workers.

We kept realizing that things were missing over the course of two weeks, like my backpack, some sunglasses, money, jewelry, some stuff out of our storage room, etc. My phone was also taken. I assumed that when he was crouching over my bed, he was trying to reach for both the phone and the charger since I was probably laying on the wire or something. My laptop and a camera were both sitting on my desk, next to my jewelry box, but he didn't take them. My parents assume it's because he was going to take the heavier items when he was about to leave so he wouldn't have to carry them around. However, I didn't see anything in his hands when he was running away from me, which makes me think that he either left the other items by the door for easy exit or there was someone else in the house helping him.

A few weird things: he took four of my shirts, two of them being exactly the same. He also went into my cousin's room and stole her towel. Thankfully, she had gone home for the summer so she wasn't around, but it almost seemed as if the thief knew that. He went into her room and my room, but completely avoided my parents' room. I also couldn't get over the fact that he drank our water straight from the jug, which would have make sense since he climbed to the second story. However, this country is notorious for being superstitious and my mom said that thieves tend to leave water out because it makes the homeowners go into a deep sleep, something about the water resembling the calming waves of an ocean. I've never been one to believe in superstition and she thinks that's why I was able to wake up.

Just a few hours after the incident, we decided that we were going to move back to the States. This wasn't the only occurrence affecting our decision, but it was the straw the broke the camel's back. I'm just thankful that we all came out safe and nothing worse happened. I'm also incredibly grateful for my cat, since he's basically the hero for waking me up. In fact, my cousins are fighting over who'll get to keep him once we leave.