Walking for 3 hours straight. At night. Alone.
Spoiler alert: Bad coding led me there
Mini suns flickered in their glass cages, lighting the road ahead. Two hours of walking made every step feel like stepping on Legos, but I forced myself to continue walking. Home is just around the corner, I convinced myself. Again.
It didn’t help that I was wearing leather shoes and school uniform. Not to mention every student’s pain in the arse (or shoulder, more accurately) that is their schoolbag.
How did I get here? Why was I walking home, after school and at night?
I’m an ambitious kid.
But even I should have known that cobbling together an interactive fiction game (basically one of the most obsolete game genres I could have chosen) for my philosophy assessment in a week was not a good idea.
And like that wasn’t enough, it was also the first game I was making in a new programming language.
I could have written an essay! I could have just written an essay…
Unsurprisingly, my philosophy teacher couldn’t make a head or tail of my game, so I stayed after class to show him how to play it.
With the right commands, the game can be played in under a minute, everything went smoothly, my game got marked, and thus concludes another ambitious project.
Yeah, right.
I got stuck on my own game, and after a good five minutes of swearing (in my head, of course), I still couldn’t figure it out.
Another five minutes later, I was chasing the school bus from the sidewalk. Then I saw the license plate. Wrong bus.
Okay, that’s annoying, but still, no biggie. I’ve got money in my Octopus (Hong Kong’s equivalent of the UK’s Oyster card or NYC’s MetroCard), and I can take public transport home myself. I called my dad at the reception (I don’t have a phone) and borrowed $10 from the receptionist, just in case. And I even loaded up Google Maps on my laptop. See, I’m taking all these precautions. What could go wrong?
Don’t tempt fate.
Not cool, Past Rachell. You had to get that cheesecake, didn’t you?
great nope this sucks $10 is not enough to get back home yikes let’s walk back to school, you remember the way right?
After circling back for the fifth time, I realized that my dead goldfish memory wasn’t going to get me back to school. Fine, whatever. I’ll just have to ride as far as I can with $10. Worst case scenario, I could walk home. After all, I’ve walked home from Choi Hung with mom before, so it shouldn’t take too long (later I realized what I remembered was walking home from another place half as far away from home as Choi Hung was. Like I said, dead goldfish memory).
I ran out of money at Choi Hung, and started walking.
It felt like a big adventure; I was gonna travel by myself independently and get home fine. I walked at a consistent pace, had enough water, and even had a stash of candies in my bag. I took pictures of the sundown — I was that chilled.
Every now and then, I would pass by a landmark — something that tickles my memory, a gas station, a road sign, a police station, and I would speed up, thinking that home must be around the corner. Yet every time I passed, it would disappear like a mirage, and the road would stretch on, like the empty expanse of the desert.
Was I scared? No.
Was that a lie? Yes.
After dark, everything became a little more despondent. But I had my thoughts to keep me company, like always, and the vague motivation that if I made it out alive, this would at least be a good story.
If I made it out alive.
I’ve been walking by the road the whole time, navigating by road signs and memory (thank god I pay attention to the window on the bus). After around two hours, I was at an intersection right outside my home. I could see the road sign, but god damn it, there was no pedestrian sidewalk to get there.
I was so tired, physically and emotionally. Throughout, I had been flickering between being excited, depressed, self-deprecating, and just plain annoyed. I could barely think clearly, and this thought flashed through my head: Was I going to die today?
So, I backtracked, thinking there might have been a street crossing that I missed. Across from me, there was a sidewalk that appeared to lead home. But there were railings and a road in between — it was obviously not made for crossing.
The cars were so close and so fast that I could see the loose asphalt grinded up by the wheels. If I don’t time this right, I will end up like that. But what else could I do? There was no way I could walk back to Choi Hung.
For at least ten minutes, I stood there, arguing with myself, on the verge of crossing the road. I was shivering and sweating, pacing back and forth, trying to decide.
Finally, like ripping off a bandage, I suddenly turned around and walked back to the sign. Safety first, better lost than dead.
In retrospect, that choice probably saved my life.
I put my faith in the architects who had designed this intersection, with the thought that if the sign was here, then there must be a way to change your route. Not long after, I found a footbridge with a hidden little street that followed the other road and led home. For 3 hours, I’ve been alone on the road, and now, I’m back, as if nothing happened. It just didn’t feel real.
I got on the elevator. Reached for the door handle.
“Rachell! Oh my god!” my brother shouted. He came rushing out, and I collapsed on the ground, so happy to be home.
“We thought you were kidnapped or something!” Jason said. I promised to tell him all about it. To my surprise, my voice failed me, and I could barely blink back the tears.
I found out that my mom had driven to the school, then to the police station, and was just about to file a missing person report when I got home. I was scolded, I cried and I fell asleep, where I relived the walk again.
What was I thinking? Why couldn’t I have gone to the police station for help? Or asked to use the phone at the train station?
But I know exactly why. It’s all back to that quote again:
“If you experienced what I experienced, you would be me.”
Part of it is because of the way I was brought up. Mom is always saying things like, ‘grow up and be independent quickly, so I can be free of you’, so it’s not a surprise that I’ve not only acquired that independent spirit, but too much of it.
The thing is, I wasn’t trying to find help; I was trying to get home. It just felt like I would be bothering someone and wasting their time…but in the end, I wasted more time, and the entire family’s emotions.
And now I’ve got this line from Hamilton stuck in my head “They think me Macbeth, and ambition is my folly.” Because it’s so true. Ambition is my folly. Or at least one of them, because now I’ve got a new line and a melody stuck in my head.
“Ambition is my folly; independence is my bane.” Sounds like something that I should get a tattoo of.
But I don’t regret this. When I calm down and think about it, I don’t regret this walk home. It was a hell of an experience, and something no one does entirely rationally, so in other words, exciting. A 100 bad nights make 100 good stories. That’s one good story, at least.
At your own risk, play the game that started it all: The Meh Place
If you would like to read another personal story:
If not, have a good day, and thank you for reading :)
