it's 3 am and

i was walking back with a group of girls i met at mario's birthday party. we are the group of drunk girls coming back from a party weaving around the sidewalk, talking at the obnoxious drunk volume, and fantasizing about peeing and already being in our own beds. we're almost inside a couple of the girl's apartments, but two prowlers decide to creep up beside us too. before they can say much we have already rejected them with laughs and rolling eyes and some of the braver, more intoxicated, utilize the verbal chokehold. swear words spill around like the sloshing beer in our stomachs. more laughter, more eye rolling. rejecting, rejecting. but even after we have made it clear that the early am lurking technique does not work, they continue to walk beside us, ask why beside us, ask why they can not be beside us. but we walk ahead. we split apart and the group becomes just me and another girl. two girls and two young men that we think to be still left in the dust we kicked up on them. but we're wrong, because the moment i decide to spin around for some reason, one of their faces is much closer than i thought. i blurt out "what are you doing?" and looking at me a little less than a foot away he says, "Why was your friend so mean? Why did she say those things to us?"

i feel foolish that my heart is throwing rapid punches at my chest and im silently wondering if they can detect this. i realize im holding the other girl's hand and how i never heard his feet, i only turned my head to see he had crept up to us.

"we all have boyfriends so when you come up to us its like fuck off. we just don't like you creeping out here at 3 am, okay?" says the blonde stranger im holding hands with.

and we are both a bit weary of "fuck off" being a trigger so we try to explain ourselves with lighter words. but when we finally walk away with their eyes following our backs up the stairs we keep talking about that one moment of turning around. they begin to sound like hyenas and we are some bones walking away. hyenas laughing when we walk up the steps and my mind says what are you doing? what are you doing? we watch for them out of her window, frightened little lambs. these hyenas will laugh and they'll say "we'll huff and puff our cigarettes and we'll blow your defenses down" but we'd say "not by the buttons on our celly cell cell phones." or something like that. because im scared and thinking of strange things.

but when i am safe in my house of bricks, i still think about the possibility of my walls being blown to pieces and my shelter collapsing.