So, I recently moved into my new apartment. It’s been a week since then and I’ve hit my head countless of times on the sloping roof in the room, to the point that I completely forgot to write up another storm as I originally intended to do a week ago.

Where have I been?

Well,… I’ve been living in my uncle’s basement for about two weeks. I originally thought that living there would be quite stressful and loud with all the kids and stuff… but as it turns out, I never got to see any of them.

Commuting so much sucks

Since my uncle lives relatively far away from the city that I study in, I had to commute to and from the university for a total of four hours, daily. That’s two hours to university… and two hours back… if everything goes well.

On Mondays and Tuesdays, I need to be there at 10 AM for my lectures. Meanwhile, I’ve got lectures at 8 AM on Wednesdays and Thursdays, as well as a lecture at 9 AM on Fridays.

That means that I got going around 6 AM on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, meaning I had to get up around 5 AM to eat breakfast and get ready… but I still managed to be late thanks to the wonderfully chaotic enigma called “Deutsche Bahn”.

It was a nightmare. I was late or missed classes left and right and what was supposed to be two hours to university would often turn into four, once even into seven. Ugh.

That said, the way home was not much better either. I didn’t really have a deadline to hit there but on the very first day, I got going at 5:30 PM and ended up arriving at 9:30 PM… that’s four hours. On other days, trains would get cancelled or arrive incredibly late, and I’d just get stuck somewhere wondering if I’d make it home at all.

Straight out of a Horror Movie

One time, I arrived at the last city around 10:30 PM.

For context, I essentially needed to get from my city here to Cologne and from there, I had to get to said “last city”… and from there, I’d just have to take a bus for 11km to arrive in the basement.

But the last bus left at 10:25 PM, my phone battery was low, and my uncle was still at work. I couldn’t possibly bother him anyway, so I decided to go for a walk… 11km in the dark isn’t that bad, after all.

I used up the last of my battery to look up the road and as it turns out it was pretty much a left turn into a right turn into “just go straight ahead for 10km”. Easy enough.

But it was quite cold outside, not to mention incredibly dark, so I decided to attempt to stop a bunch of cars.

A total of 40 cars ran right past me despite slowing down considerably after they saw me. One car actually stopped and these two dudes were impressed that I had planned to walk those 10km at night in this cold. They said they’d take me with them, one of them even opened the door to get into the backseat… but then they just drove off, nearly running over my foot.

Assholes.

Anyway, so I started walking. I get not taking hitchhikers with ya, especially in bigger cities and this late at night, but to get someone’s hopes up, only to drive away is quite cruel, I’d say…

The last bastion of light with illuminated roads and the safety of people on their way home faded away as I entered the dark woods that stood between me and my destination. It was a moonlit night, I thought to myself, so it couldn’t possibly be that bad to wander through this forest, especially along the road… but little did I know that the forests love to play pranks on one such as myself, closing the gaps between their branches and not letting any moonlight illuminate the dark road ahead.

As I strutted through this place, countless cars raced past me, zooming at incredible speeds with no care in the world. It’s a 70km/h zone here but those vehicles were clearly travelling at a much faster velocity.

It started to get foggy, the moon was hiding behind stormy clouds, and as the late-night traffic let up, I was left alone with myself and Mother Nature.

I constantly heard something walking beside my path, as I tried my best to skedaddle out of this forest as soon as possible, the noise of bushes rustling intensified. Terrifying. I didn’t see anything in the dark – no animals or other shadowy figures, although I couldn’t even see the road ahead or my own hand, to be frank.

And then… my eyes spied a flickering light in the distance. A will-o-wisp of sorts, resting its fatigued soul on the asphalt of the road… well, no, it was a flashlight.

A flickering and dirty flashlight was lying in the middle of the road, carefully placed as if it was meant to be seen by me.

Yeah, one of those tropes, eh?

I didn’t get to pick it up, though, (not that I would have… who knows what germs are on that thing!) as the sounds behind me escalated. I started running. I needed to haul ass – and haul ass I did. Whatever was out there clearly meant business! Oh, woe is me, to be eaten by an unspeakable horror unknown to man, lying in the woods by a small town near Cologne.

I hurried over a bridge, running further and further towards a red light that I could spot in the distance. Eventually, though, the sounds stopped.

Completely out of breath, I arrived at a crossing. I saw it on the map before. I must have reached the halfway mark… only five more kilometres to go! My hands were numb from the cold, so I decided to warm them with a good rubbing while I waited in the safety of my newfound sanctuary. Never before was I this happy about a red light, for there was a car impatiently waiting for it to change its colour.

To avoid any possible trouble, I took off my pride pins from my jacket and stored them in my jute bag. I walked up to the car, asking the driver if I could hitch a ride. He told me to hop in. No hesitation.

The driver was an odd fella, clearly under some kind of influence, be it demonic or other, but I figured that whatever was inside here was better than what was lurking out there.

On his way back from work, he told me in an odd tone. His face reminded me of Steve Buscemi. As I struggled to put the seatbelt on, he spoke of how he had to feed his “beasts” at home. Whether he was talking about kids or pets, I wasn’t sure, but I was afraid to ask. Based on context it could literally be either. Whenever one was more likely, he contradicted himself by making the other seem more likely.

I replied briefly to his questions, and whenever possible I thanked him for letting me hitch a ride.

Buscemi was rather odd, I thought.

His tone and manner of speaking were unusual in a way… but I couldn’t quite make up what bothered me about it. He’d at times utter sentences that made no sense in my tired mind, so I just nodded along. I was afraid about possibly causing offence or hurt, and hence thought long and hard about any and all replies I could and should give. In the end, I ended up being rather quiet, so the driver probably thought of me as an odd fella as well.

In the end, he brought me home within minutes. I got to leave safe and sound, and just dropped onto my bed like a plank that was barely standing to begin with, and I drifted off in a long slumber, after praying that my next commute from university would be better.

Fin? Fin!

I tried to go for something there. Anyway, I was genuinely scared in that forest. I know that there aren’t any dangerous animals in forests these days over here in Germany but I was tired, cold and hungry. I’m sure my mind was playing tricks on me because it wanted me to hurry on.

Well, it helped.

The other times, the commute wasn’t all that bad. I eventually got to move in, as previously mentioned and thus don’t have to deal with public transport quite as much.

At the main station, there are times when the busses are way too full, leading to me being late because I didn’t fit into the bus. That being the case, the way from university to the main station is relatively easy on the legs given that I only have to walk down the mountain, so I’ve been taking the bus up and I’ve been walking down the mountain on my way home.

Life in the new flat is nice. The next Aldi (Nord) is only five minutes away. It takes me less than two minutes to get to the main station. Aside from that, I live under the roof but we have an elevator, so that’s pretty darn nice. Thank god that it worked for the move.

This upcoming weekend, my parents will come over again, bringing me some more stuff and essentially helping me finish up the rest of the apartment. I still don’t have a desk and my bed didn’t survive the move quite as well as I thought it would, so I’ll get my sister’s old bed instead (since she’s never at home). My back hurts and the pain probably is supposed to mean that my back’s looking forward to sleeping in a proper bed.

As for my temporary desk… it’s a box. Cardboard works surprisingly well. It’s stable and I can write on it without any issues. The clothes inside stabilize it rather well, too… but I’m also looking forward to having my new desk once it’s here. 🙂

On another note, I’ve been having a good time at university. I’ll write another post on that on another day…

Oh, and I may be able to return to streaming and more frequent blogging around late November since the internet guy is coming on November 23rd or something along those lines. Really excited!

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.