It’s a jungle out there
Poison in the very air we breathe
Do you know what’s in the water that we drink?
Well I do; it’s a-ma-zing
People think I’m crazy, to worry like I do
If you paid attention, you’d be worried too
You better pay attention, or this world
We love
so much
Might
just
kill
you
    — Randy Newman’s “It’s a Jungle Out There”

I’ve not had horrible neighbors. I’ve had nice neighbors, so I’ve been fortunate, even if it may be due to my general aura of woobieness that kind people detect and then want to help.

Unfortunately, sometimes they accidentally end up not helping.

It’s very, very hard for me to tell people, in person, “Hey, y’know, I’ve got PTSD and parents who want to kill me.” A blog is okay these days, but remember it took years for me to even do it on a blog.

I’ve been known to do crazy things in the past, and I used to be a bit more loquacious on the PTSD and psychotic parents thing, but I found out the hard way that some people actually are repelled by such explanations, and that can easily turn unwitting information leakers into willing partners of my parents, and that’s not at all good.

Especially if the neighbors can keep track of when you leave, when you come home, how late you stay up ((Before I realized that lights attracted earwigs, I had my lights on a random timer even when I was at home.)), when you take the car out, when you pick up your mail ((Yeeeaaah, there’s more than one reason the mailbox triggers me.))… if they’re very observant, where you’re likely to go when you leave home based on how you dress. And if they’re very kind, you’ll never know they’re doing this until it’s almost too late.

Oddly, it’s the neighbors who have no idea what’s going on who usually help, if incidentally, because they’ll leak information both ways instead of just one. “Some nice people stopped by to ask me after you….”

It’s worrying to think about the past, especially when it brings itself up in dreams. It’s even more worrying to realize that sometimes it really was only luck that kept me alive. I swear to gods, it’s like I had to be a fucking detective to stay a step in front of my parents. Not a life I wanted to live.

Probably my brain is just trying to keep me in practice in case my parents do show up and have been in the general vicinity.

Which means that if I haven’t had intimations otherwise, or if I had and those intimations have been disproved, I should probably stop worrying. I’ll know when they get here. I just hope that it’s in time to avoid a head shot or something, but if I don’t realize it in time, I simply wouldn’t ever have been able to realize it in time.

… It’s logical, but it’s not comforting at all.

It helps that my parents are, as I’ve alluded to before, stupid. Charismatic, but stupid. If only they didn’t have the first part, for psychopaths are not obviously so all the time.