Raincoat

It’s a small memory. A fragment almost entirely hidden in your hazy recollection of past years, of oddly dream-like days where the imagination ran wild and free, blurring the lines of the so-called “reality” that you now have as an adult, and your innocence and carefree youth kept you for the most part very happy. You were young, in 1st grade. Late at night you stumbled from the bathroom, and bleary-eyed walked through the familiar dark of your room that still scared you quite often. You were too tired to be afraid, so you didn’t rush as you normally did into the sheets. You walked past the slightly dirty window with a view of a dimly lit street below, and you thought you saw somebody in what was maybe a yellow raincoat walking up the street.

This began to happen often. You would wake up with the urge to look out the window, and sometimes you would see him.

He indeed wore a yellow jacket, even on the driest of nights. You’d see the strange man walking up the street in the deadest hour of the night, and even in your young age you knew that was weird. You’d watch him for a few seconds, and every time he stopped and looked around, then turned towards your house, and you’d quickly duck under the covers and not come out until morning. Eventually, though, Mom put up blinds and you stopped looking for the weird man.

Days, weeks, months passed. Years went by, rolling like an endless and unstoppable tide. School, friends, hobbies, girls, they all pushed the strange set of memories from your conscious mind. One night, in your senior year of college, you were studying late at the library. When you finally packed it in, you headed out and started to walk home to your apartment a few blocks down, since gas is expensive.

On a drearily lit street, you got the creepy feeling that someone was watching you. A few times you turned around but nobody was behind you. Then you felt like it was coming from higher up, and you looked at a slightly dirty window in a strangely familiar house. But there was nobody.

You shrugged it off and, as a loud crack of thunder pealed overhead, you gladly threw on your yellow raincoat and continued up the silent street.