Almost killed while getting robbed as a child in a ice cold winter day

I stood at the base of the mountains freezing cold. Why I had signed up to go for this school trip to climb the mountains in such a heavy winter, I thought to myself. I regretted not going with my parents instead like my brothers had.

It was probably below 20 degrees, and all I could see was a white and beautiful frothy cover of snow hugging the mountain and the trees.

“Class we will all climb together to the top of the mountain where the cabana is, our final destination. To get there we need around three hours,” said my teacher.

Three hours! That must be a joke. At least I hope it was. I wasn’t even dressed for this kind of weather. My boots, within half an hour of walking, were sulking wet from the snow and the water had begun to turn into granules of ice. I couldn’t feel my toes, but I couldn’t let myself down because of that. Being a competitive soul, I wanted to get there first. My light blue sheepskin coat protected me a bit from the cold but I still looked like a frozen goofy bear.

I saw my teacher ahead of me climbing the mountain, going deep into the woods and saving at least five minutes for each road coil. I started following him thinking it was not a bad idea; at least I will get to the cabana faster. The view was spectacular and I got a bit lucky to see a dear and some wild rabbits. Since climbing was harder in the woods, it felt much warmer. Once at the cabana, we were all sweating instead of freezing. We had some hot tea and went all the way back down again in about an hour. I had no energy left to go down, so I slid all the way on my bum resting on a plastic bag since the snow was smooth and tempting.

The drive back home was long and I began getting cold again since all my clothes were wet and I couldn’t feel my numbed feet. In my tiredness and numbness, I forgot to tell the driver to stop across the street from my building, but luckily I stopped him only a block down.

While walking towards my house, I thought I got paranoid as I felt someone was following me on the street. I was frozen, sleepy and perhaps feverish too. I tried to walk faster and faster, and I got more worried when I entered in the dark alley towards my building. I could hear the footsteps following my footsteps and the faster I went, the faster the footsteps behind me got. I entered the building in haste and as soon as I began going up the stairs, a strong hand grabbed my waist and with the other hand covered my mouth so I don’t scream.

All kinds of scenarios were running through my head. One of them was that if he kills me, how my parents will feel. Another scenario was if I escaped, where I will go because the key is at the bottom of my bag and I wouldn’t have time to get to it. While this guy was busy searching my pockets for money and grabbing me by the neck every time I tried to scream, I heard someone coming down the staircase towards us. I suddenly felt thrown to the wall, and I immediately started running up as fast as I could, crying and making a very weird growling sound.

I almost pushed over my next door neighbour and ran all the way to the fourth floor and tried to enter my neighbour’s home. The door was locked. I hysterically knocked with my fists and feet, but nobody opened the door. I heard footsteps again and began throwing myself at the door as the steps came closer and I could hear someone running back up towards me and out of desperation I sat down next to the door crying.

I started to scream terrified when he touched me but I couldn’t scream. I was the only one hearing my scream in my head because no sound was coming out. I got so scared that I lost my voice or my hearing.

It was my neighbour who had seen me run and cry and had come back after me to check if I was okay. I couldn’t speak a word for five days. I am not sure now if it was because I got cold and my feet wore frozen for so long or because of the panic attack that I had when I got robbed and almost killed.

I was wild and scared of about anything. My neighbour had never seen me like this before. He opened the door for me and I entered the house shivering and I began to cry in the same growling sound. After I calmed down a bit, I wrote down so they could understand what happened to me. My entire body was shaking and my hands were having spasms. They nicely told me not to worry and that my grandpa was home and he would take care of me.

Believe it or not, after he was told what happened to me, my grandpa grabbed the biggest knife and went down to find the thief. It sounds like a bad commando movie in which everything goes wrong right from the start. Well, the good thing was that unlike today’s children, I wasn’t carrying expensive phones as we didn’t have such privileges back then nor did I have a lot of money. The thief got only about ten dollars and nothing else happened to me except a big shock and the loss of voice… since I talk so much, losing the voice wasn’t a big issue; in fact, it was nice and quiet in the house for a few days.