I know this is a wall o’ text, so I understand if you don’t want to post it for that reason. I can promise you it is completely true, though…it’s written as well as I can from when I posted it on SA a while back, so it reads rather story-like, but nothing in this is made-up, although some of it is speculation. If you have any questions, feel free to send me a message.
When I was 15, I lived in Aurora, Colorado, which is still kind of a bizarre amalgamation of wilderness corridors, standard suburbs of wildly varying income levels, and trailer parks. One night, my friend M. and I were trying to meet up with a couple of friends of ours. We were supposed to meet at a particular parking lot at a specific time, but when the appointed time came and went, our friends hadn’t shown up. This was long before cell phones were common outside of certain businesses and super-rich people, so we had the options of going home, waiting in the gathering dusk with nothing to do, or wandering around to various places we all frequented in hopes of finding our friends and bitching them out. Our home lives weren’t great, and the parking lot was dull, so we opted to wander around. This was pretty unproductive, and it had gotten to be full dark at the point that everything turned to the terrifying.