Please secure your doors.

I'm not sure if he was a stalker or if it was a strange break-in. So I was terrified from the start that I would fail this one class and hence not be able to get my AA degree. Later that day, I was in my apartment complex's pool with other friends and roommates when I checked my phone and discovered that I had passed my class. I became overjoyed and informed everyone that we were celebrating since I was the last one to have a final. I felt we should have some fun before we all went our separate ways three days before I got to walk and graduate with this degree. We opted not to go out as the night progressed and instead stayed in. We invited a few more folks over and carried on with the night. Around 2 a.m., people began to depart and went to bed, leaving just my two roommates, both of whom were dating, and one other buddy.

We were still joking about, so we went night swimming because our apartment was on the first floor and right next to the pool. As soon as we finished that, I was ready to simply hang out and be done for the night. My housemates and another buddy all departed to go someplace else for a short while, which was OK because being at home alone was nothing out of the norm for me. I took some lunch and returned to my room to wait for them to return. My room is all the way at the rear of our apartment, farthest away from the front entrance and the patio door. It's behind the kitchen, and you'd have to travel through the entire apartment to get there. Our apartment was near the entrance gate since it was at the front of the complex and near the pool at the time the gate was left open due to a malfunctioning lock. Until this night, I had never had a problem with living so near to the front door. My room has one large window, and when I don't have the blinds or drapes closed, you can clearly see into it. I had a closet with mirror doors where you could see every area of my room if you looked in through the window. So, while I waited for my friends to return, I fell asleep. The last time I glanced at a clock, it was 3:30 a.m. Also, a significant factor in this is that my bedroom light was turned on when I went to sleep. The second time I woke up, it was around 5:30 a.m., and there were slow flashes going off in the corner of my room, like I had a strobe light going off. I was bewildered and believed it was my pals coming back to screw with me. . Once my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I realized it wasn't my friends who were messing with me, but a single man at least 6'1 wearing a green hoodie with the hood on in the corner of my room by my closet holding a phone up taking pictures of me, mind you I was wearing tiny Sophie shorts with one of my legs hanging out of my covers. . I don't believe he noticed I'd woken up until I yelled "what the fuck" and instead of rushing at me or fleeing out of my room, the man placed the phone down and walked out, without saying anything, not in a panic, just walked away. I, being the idiot that I am, went after him shouting "HEY!" I attempted to follow him out, but when I got to the front door, I couldn't find him anywhere. I raced back inside, woke up all my roommates, and asked if they were joking with me. When they replied no, I contacted the cops.

When I looked around my room, the only item missing was my laptop, which was on my desk in the distant corner. The strangest aspect was that my laptop was in the farthest part of my room with my door locked, and outside in the kitchen on the counter were three other MacBook laptops, two wallets, and at least a $300 speaker, yet the only thing gone from the entire apartment was my laptop. Later, I discovered that the front door and the patio door were never locked when everyone returned, and that the police were unable to locate the guy or my computer. To make matters worse, the sim disk from my camera was in the computer, so all of my personal photos from that camera were now accessible to this guy. Some things I witnessed a few days later, while I was preparing to move out, frightened me out even more. As I previously stated, if you looked through my window, you could see my closet mirrors and pretty much my entire room. One item that stood out was my tapestry, which had two wolves howling up to a moon and was all black and white. When I was packing my car one day, it was getting dark, and as I looked up, I noticed in the apartment above mine through the blinds on the wall was the exact same tapestry as the one in my room. What made it even creepier was the fact that I had little purple lights on it from my mom because she knows my favorite color is purple. Of that room, the lights in the fan were replaced with purple ones. As if I wasn't already creeped out, an all black cat walked up to the window, and my stomach began to churn because a year before, when I was still living in my room, I had a young kitten that was all black. In the end, the person was never located, and I never saw his face, which still frightens me to this day, and I pray I never see him again.

I never got my laptop back, and I never located my camera's sim card. My best tip to anyone living in a college town is to always lock the doors. Because you never know what you'll find when you wake up.