Sam’s Journal of Survival

I was kidnapped by a Stalker

011726. This journal is fiction. The voice you’re reading is a character, not the author.
I was kidnapped

I keep circling something I haven’t written down yet.

Not because I don’t know how. Because once it’s on the page, it’s real in a way that feels permanent.

I was kidnapped.

That sentence looks smaller than it feels.

I’ve said it out loud before, in controlled rooms, to professionals who already knew the ending. I’ve never written it here. Writing feels different. Writing doesn’t let me skim past it.

I don’t want to tell the story of it. Not now. I don’t want to describe where I was taken or how long I was gone or what it felt like to be trapped inside someone else’s choices.

What matters is this: I didn’t walk away unchanged.

People hear the word survived and think it means finished. Over. Done. They don’t see how survival stretches forward, reshaping everything that comes after.

That’s the part I live with.

I don’t know yet how much of this I’ll be able to tell. I only know that avoiding the word entirely has started to feel heavier than writing it once.

So there it is.

I was kidnapped.

The rest can wait.