Miko who is renowned for her wonderful memoirs has asked me many times to share stories from my life on this blog. Until now I have shied away from it, focussing on things I feel readers would find interesting and exciting rather than having to trawl through some awkward writing about my mundane life. It makes me uncomfortable to share even the smallest detail, especially as I can’t control who may end up reading it.

But this morning, due to self-inflicted sleep depravation, I will disobey my better judgement and share something from my past. The memory was triggered by an episode on ClickNathan:

Stuff Goes Missing. Everyone knows that.

It happened throughout my teenage years, underwear going missing, my mother constantly hassling me that she can’t afford to keep buying new ones. It never occurred to me as odd that I had to get a new pack every month, I’d never known it to be different. “Big deal,” I’d say, “underwear gets eaten up by washing machines all the time, that’s what happens.” And so it went on for years.

Then one afternoon I awoke from a nap to the sound of clanging against my bedroom window bars. The curtains had been opened. There was a stick hanging, caught on the bars, and attached to the end – my panties. They had moved from the laundry pile next to the window. They looked so shamed. And there they dangled for a while as I stood in dumb amazement at my own naivety.

The next-door neighbour’s door quietly clicked shut. The neighbour who used to incessantly invite me over to swim in his pool, to play with his kids. The man who would water the flowers in front of my window twice a day, while staring through the window. Always watching, always there, always creepy. I suppose you could count him as my first stalker…

Although he was really quite harmless… compared to the second.

Not to be continued.