Foolish Child

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As with most people, I've been robbed a few times. I've been fortunate that it's always been my property, and not direct robberies I have to experience. However, I know from many past experiences that I do not think rationally during these experiences. One of the earliest thefts I encountered did not actually occur to me, so much as it was my childhood house robbed. Mom worked two jobs to keep us, and my stepdad worked on the other side of town. I walked home from school each day, and was comfortable with the journey. One day, when I came home, the door was wide open. Something in my brain shut down, as I'm tiny and scrawny and have always had terrible anxiety. We were friendly with two neighbors, so a rational thought would have been to run to either of them and call the police. Instead, I opened the screen door and walked inside. My stepdad used to spend all our money on down payments for studio equipment, fancying himself a musician (his lyrics were fantastic but he couldn't do them justice and refused to sell them, unfortunately). The living room and what would have been the dining room were basically full of music equipment he would never actually pay off. And it was gone. I stood in the middle of chaos, things thrown everywhere and empty space where I knew expensive electronics were supposed to be. And instead of running, I walked into the middle of it. I walked deeper into the house to get to our phone. And I called Mom, not the police. She told me to run outside and stay away while she called the police, and I was fortunate that the robbers had been gone during my foolish approach, but it took some time for it to finally click for me that I should never have gone inside at all. As a fun aside, the robbers were actually caught only about a week later. One of the neighbors we were friendly with noticed intruders and, remembering we'd been robbed, called the police. The criminals were caught because they came back for the instruction manuals for one of the things they'd stolen.