Crazy Nice: On Confronting My Stalker

For weeks last spring, I collected missed calls from a number I did not recognize. Then, one evening, I picked up. 

Hello? Hello?! How persistent, his need. A new number. 

I hung up.

He’s stalking you, my therapist said. 

Stalking, I learned, is a pattern of repeated and unwanted attention, harassment, or contact. It can include threats against the person being stalked (or their family and friends). It can include non-consensual communication, or really any behavior used to contact, harass, or threaten (RAAIN). But when my therapist broached the topic, I did not know this. 

It started because I wanted to be perceived as kind. My neighbor, a grayed man, sat out on our stoop each day, for what seemed like long stretches of time. He was usually there for both my comings and goings. He liked to smoke weed and talk on the phone. He hung his cane on the wrought iron fence surrounding a small patch of grass beside our building. In the summer, it became a vibrant green. 

At first, he did not smile at me, so I kept a stoic face. But with each passing, I had to be mindful of the front door. If I exercised its full range of motion, I would hit my neighbor. 

I first became a writer because I was lonely. I was an only child. Early on in my childhood, all the families with other children in the neighborhood moved away. At school, I was shunned. I want to say it was because of my weight, or perhaps my Indian accent, but I think now it was my loneliness. The other children could smell it on me. 

My lonely radar has always attuned me to others. The outcasts, the addicts, anyone with a storied past.

When I saw my neighbor, day in and out, I recognized his loneliness. At first what came over me was a crashing wave of sympathy. Never the question: Why is he so lonely? Or the thought: It is not my job to fix his loneliness. Early abandonment had re-shaped the landscape of my brain—I was so attuned to the needs of others, and how I might fill those needs, like water moving over parched earth. 

And while I outsized my responsibility toward others, I also could not perceive myself clearly: I was no longer a chubby little girl, but a beautiful young woman. Although I was able to hold this knowledge in certain moments, I had trouble internalizing it, consistently knowing it. 

I should also say that for the longest time, until my late 20s, I did not realize that I should only go on dates with people that I am attracted to. I routinely went on dates with men I was not attracted to, and then found myself pining for their attention. When I revealed this to my best friend, and later my therapist, they both sighed. Oh, Megan. 

This is all to say—one summer night, it was pouring. I was waiting on an Uber to take me to meet my date (a man I was moderately attracted to, though the feelings waxed and waned). My neighbor was hanging out in the stairwell. 

I said hello. He said hello. And that he liked my hair.

I checked my app—two minutes changed to eight… the driver was going around the block, and I knew it would take longer with the rain. 

My neighbor asked me where I was from. No, really, where was I from? 

I gave him the answer he wanted. My parents are from India, but I grew up in the states. 

Ah, he said. It explained my face. 

I felt pulled in two directions. The first—that we were making innocent conversation. Even though his eyes roved up and down my frame. The second—we were not making innocent conversation, there was a part for me to play. And then: Why was I so cold to this harmless old man? 

He said: We have similar cultures. Then he told me about the fish curry he had just made. He asked if I would like to come over to try some.

My driver arrived. I smiled at my escape.

Give me your number, he said. 

Later, in therapy, I discussed the many responses I could have given: (1) I don’t give out my number to strangers, (2) why don’t you give me your number instead? (3) I’m sorry, I’m not comfortable with that…

But at that moment I could not think. I gave it away.

When I discuss this with my female friends, most all of them say the same thing: I never know what to do when someone asks for my number; I know I don’t have to respond if they text; it’s easier to give it than deal with their disappointment—“disappointment” which I edit to rage. 

My neighbor texts me, of course, minutes later. Hey Beautiful. It was so nic [sic] to meet u. When are u coming over? Come for dinner.

I mute my phone, put it away. I had made a mistake. Outside my window, rain blurred the streetlight into haze. 

*

One of my persistent fears is that I am difficult to love. This fear has led me down many desolate roads. If I am difficult to love, then I should be grateful for what I receive. I should not reject another person’s attention. (Attention and affection—I have spent decades confusing one for the other.)

I grew up in a home with alcoholic rage. I feared, and still fear, the negative emotions of others. I am adept at denial. 

At first, my strategy was to ignore him. I tried to push the matter out of my mind, first the texts, then the phone calls. For a week, I left early for work and let my social life keep me out late. I successfully avoided our stoop run ins. 

When we finally did meet, on a Saturday afternoon when I had miscalculated my routine, I was right: He was mad. 

I’ve been calling and texting, why you don’t pick up? He rose. His brows, knotted, his gaze, dark. 

I’m not comfortable with your messages.

What?! He steps off the stoop, toward me. Persisting: What did you say? 

I don’t like when you speak to me that way. 

What way? His face breaking into a smile. 

I hold his gaze. 

Do not contact me, I say.

I open the door. Run up the stairs. I block his number. 

*

Why does my desire to be nice outweigh my desire to assert my own needs? Or perhaps the better question: Why is niceness my knee jerk reaction? A compulsion over which I have (almost) no control. 

Though I hope, in writing, to reclaim some of that control. To reinforce the neural pathway that points toward self protection. Versus smiling when I am afraid. Versus ruminating when I am home alone at night, checking if the door is locked again, for the third time.

A friend and I recently exchanged voice notes about how we both sometimes come into our apartments late at night, and go around looking for intruders: peering into closets, slowly drawing back the shower curtain to reveal an empty tub. I never stopped looking for monsters under my bed. 

I don’t do this every night. Only the nights when my anxiety has quietly crept up throughout the day. My sense of safety: fragile, diminished. 

*

There is a man who I sometimes encounter on the train, always at night. He covers his face with a gray mask. He sings to the car but his songs are frightening. Quickly the train car turns from bemusement into breathlessness. Most of us are waiting for the train to pull into the next station, so we can rush into a different car, cross the platform for the local train.

What is consent? The agreement of two parties to participate, to co-create a moment. The moment will inevitably change. And therefore the agreement must be nimble, and the parties attuned to the shifting tides within the other.

Is the absence of consent a kind of captivity? Or is the feeling of captivity exclusive to me? The careful minding, rearranging of my face, so as to never give away my own discomfort, disgust.

A year later, after blocking my neighbor’s number and exchanging brisk head nods and terse smiles, I received some WhatsApps with his name. My therapist asks me how I am feeling, and I can finally say it. 

I’m afraid.

What are you afraid of?

What I am always afraid of. Retaliation. 

Those moments on the train, I never think to say anything. To find my voice. What I do instead is endure. Of course, some of this is the New Yorker persona that has been educated into me—crazy shit happens all the time, pay it no mind. Except, sometimes I do mind. Sometimes everything inside me is screaming. But my face reads as serene. 

This is the nature of my own trap. What has kept me safe enough—always appeasing those who aggress me, and what has trapped me, shoving down my emotions back into my throat. 

When it comes to my neighbor, there are many routes my therapist presents to me: calling the police, asking about my options, filing a complaint. Sensible, perhaps. But it doesn’t satisfy me. It doesn’t make me feel like the issue is resolved. 

I want, for the first time, to have a voice. I decide to confront him.

The opportunity presents itself suddenly. One morning I am walking down the stairs, and I see my neighbor locking his door. We are the only two in the hallway. We make eye contact, and I look away. But then, I look back. I have decided. 

Do not contact me.

What? He asks. I can’t hear you. What did you say?

I said, do not contact me. Don’t call me, don’t text me.

His face breaks into a smile. 

I don’t even know your name. He holds my gaze. 

Is this true? My mind races. Have I invented this entire scenario, am I aggressing this man, am I to blame?

If you want me to call you, give me your number. I can call you. He is laughing, walking toward me, holding out his phone. 

I was not insane. As I stood there, looking at his outstretched hand, I realized we were caught in a dance. He wanted my attention, and I gave it inconsistently. Which, I imagined, was exciting. 

I thought myself detached, but I was still engaged, trying to control his behavior, to redirect his need. My alternating fear and pity had ensnared me. He moved closer, the only space between us was a single step. 

I stepped off the staircase onto the landing. I looked him in the eye. I laughed.

I don’t want that.

Something severed within me. The chord that bound us. I could not control his behavior, but I could refuse to give it any more of my attention. 

Once, in a commedia dell’arte class, we explored the physicality of power. We worked on a scale of ten, ten having the most frenetic movement, and one being stillness. Stillness conveyed wealth and power. I see this at my job all the time. You can tell who the boss is, their fingers do not flutter over the keyboard, they command the room with their gaze.

When I think about a woman stepping into her own power, I think about stillness and presence. My own movement has often been frenetic, and my emotional movement—how I ruminate, despair, mask it with a pleasant face. . . frenetic as well. 

*

When I first wrote the ending to this draft, here is the concluding paragraph that I landed on: 

When I descended the stairs to the first floor landing, my neighbor watching me, I felt myself assume a regal air. I felt that, finally, I did want to be there, wholly present in my life. Not scampering away.

I’m interested in my own impulse to write a happy ending, an ending where resolution comes easily. 

What I wrote in my first draft was both true, and not true. I did descend the stairs, I did feel a moment of regalness. I did want, desperately, to become wholly present in my life. And yet, when I shut the front door, my mind roved over the possible outcomes of my behavior. Had I invited a future confrontation? Would I come home one night to find him waiting in front of my door? Or worse, would I find him waiting there with a friend? 

This was my biggest fear, coming home alone, late at night, to find someone waiting for me at my door. It seemed so plausible. So easy. 

And yet, it did not happen. As of last year, my hallway confrontation was the last confrontation we had. I did block my neighbor’s second number, and I have not been contacted by a third number. I did stop giving my energy to our wordless engagements. I stopped smiling politely. I stopped smiling.