Danger

Tonight became one hell of a night. I'm not sure how strange this is going to sound, but when I'm in the middle of a situation it's like what happens with Frodo at the end of the Lord of the Rings book in the chapter of "The Scouring of the Shire." I fall into a role, take charge of what needs to be done, and go through a kind of adrenaline rush when facing the danger. This is ultimately what I kick into when the welfare of other people become a concern and they need someone to get them through it. I've done it for my sister when a man got shot in front of us in our childhood, it's happened when an abusive ex made a point to bad mouth a cherished family member and I got defensive without any thought of how him or his mother might react to my vehemence.

The big thing for me is that while feeling scared can grate the nerves, I also can't help but feel like I'm most alive when I'm facing very real and actively threatening circumstances.

So to put this in some context, I manage a group (technically an organization) on my college campus. We had a meeting today; it was a lot of fun. After the meeting, I indicated to one of my group members that we could go someplace to smoke some weed since he was still trying to recover from a hangover. Another friend wanted to come along, so we took her with us as well. We decided to drive to a trail that I like to frequent a lot, and we walked for a while as me and our hungover friend smoked a little. We saw a strange man pacing back and forth for long parts of the trail, nodding to us and moving with an unsettling gait. I immediately recognized something off about this man because that's the kind of behavior I've seen from men coming up to me and asking if I'll trade sexual favors for drugs with them. For a time, we just kept moving and I kept my eye on him without trying to alert my two friends to my suspicions. We got to sharing some deep family traumas between the three of us and I feel like we became closer during that time. But in the all the talk and analysis, we lost track of how much time had passed and the cold dark descended on us quickly as we started to head back. Not long after that, I noticed lights slowly creeping up behind us as we kept a brisk pace. Eventually, a cop car reached us and the two men asked about the very guy we had seen when we first started walking. After we gave the gentlemen a physical description and how long ago we had crossed paths with him, they drove farther ahead in search of him. At this point, my female friend was becoming nervous. She wanted to get home with all haste. My other friend and I kept ourselves focused on the path ahead of us to looked for anything unusually suspicious with the flashlights on our cell phones. A second set of lights pulled up to us, this time only one cop was present. He asked the same questions, and I had thought my nervous friend would ask if we could catch a ride with him but she didn't. I felt a little guilty after that for not saying anything, but nevertheless I kept pushing to get them to the safety of my vehicle.

As we kept walking, just as we were nearing an exit in the forest where the trail meets a main road, we heard a woman frantically screaming. She was crying for help, and it put us all on red alert. My lady friend lurched forward in a panic and my other friend and I froze in trying to identify the direction of the source. I quickly called 911 thinking it must be the man doing some god awful bullshit to this poor woman, and even though the dispatch told me that the police had already picked him up I'm glad I still called and brought the danger to their attention.

As soon as we reached the car, my panic stricken friend broke down and cried. My other friend and I made a point to not leave her alone while we consoled her and I made sure they got to the safety of their residence so they could hang out and try to process what happened. My thoughts were that my usual curfew can fuck itself as this was much more important to me, that they feel safe and able to depend on me to look after them. I'll be damned if I let anything prevent me from pursuing this agenda.

As soon as I got home, I went to hang out with some really close friends of mine. These are people who knew me before I became involved in kink at all, they were there when I was just starting to learn to come out of my shell. At their place, I felt like I could unwind and come down from the rush of what happened. I told them all about what happened, we binged some more Avatar (it totally lives up to its' reputation), and then I headed back to my apartment when they were ready to hit the sack.