Break-in's... Mind Violation?

Last night my roommate and I were sitting in our living room trying to study amongst the rave-like noises outside our apartment on Easton Ave, which were of course the result of the Rutgersfest festivities. I was trying to work on my blogs as a matter of fact, struggling because I couldn't figure out what to write about for my last few. Around 11pm we heard a loud bang from downstairs and then a few seconds later another loud bang. It was enough to shake the house and my roommate and I both commented on how much we hate it when the drunks on the street bang on our front door, especially on nights like these. As I went back to writing my blog comforted by the fact that the banging seemed to have stopped, I noticed my roommate's bedroom door, which was located off of the kitchen, slowly open so that I considerable amount of light was shining through. I turned to her and asked her if she had noticed the door move and to my surprise she said something that quite frankly, scared the shit out of me. She told me that one of our other roommates was in her bedroom and had looked at her, very slowly put her finger to her lips as to say be quiet and slowly closed the door back.

Now this wouldn't necessarily be the scariest thing ever two things hadn't been true: first, we don't share bedrooms and therefore our other roommate who lived on another floor entirely would have no cause at all to be in that room and second, that other roommate in question I knew for a fact, had been in her room upstairs for the past few hours. I told the roommate I was with that she was wrong and that it was not our other roommate and after a split-second pause we both ran into my room, which is off of the living room locked the door and stood in the farthest corner near a window. We looked outside to see if and police officer's were outside stationed across the street where they usually are, and there were none, so we proceeded to call our landlord then the police. The police were in our house with in less than a minute of my phone call and called us out of my room to tell us it was safe. My other roommate who was up in her room came running down looking confused and the police officer nearest notified us that someone had kicked in our back door and inside door and gotten into my roommates bedroom.

However, that wasn't the freakiest part. When my roommate went to survey her room to see if anything had been stolen she was surprised to see nothing was missing, her ipod was still sitting on her bed as well as her wallet and many other valuables. Nothing had been moved our taken and all that was left as a result of our intruder was two busted doors. The cops (rookies not 5 years older than myself) immediately wrote the whole thing off as a drunk guy who had gotten lost and confused into thinking that it was his apartment and left. They wrote a quick report as our landlady hysterically tried to fix the doors and left as quick as they came.

So, this might have been the scariest few minutes of my life to date and I have to state a few things I noticed about it. The fear of not knowing what was happening, and knowing that I had no way to defend myself if the worst had happened or if my roommate wasn't with me, was the most torture I've ever been in that had absolutely nothing to do with physical pain, which makes me think of Scarry's classifications of torture. However after the torture subsided, the adrenaline that was rushing through my body made me feel more alive in the face of potential death than I have ever felt and for at least a few hours after, that I thought about how lucky I was that things didn't end worse than they did and that things that I've felt were important in my life for so long like school and a career mean nothing in death. All of these sensations were a direct result of my situation, the torture, which was caused by fear and then gave me liberation. I feel like this experience related to a lot of the discussions that we've had in class about the mind-body-pain link, all of which worked together to help me cope with a traumatic experience.

Of course, after my adrenaline died down I knew life still had to go on and I would still need to finish up the semester's coursework, which includes these blogs so I wrote one, this one...

(PS, the guy that did it is still at large and we don't think he was after money, he more likely had a more aggressive intent... and the investigation is ongoing.)