Sam’s Journal of Survival

Who’s Fault Was It

011826 This journal is fiction. The voice you’re reading is a character, not the author.

Who’s Fault Was It

I keep asking myself a question that never seems to have a satisfying answer.

Why me?

I know now that it wasn’t personal in the way people usually mean when they say that. It wasn’t about who I was or what I did. It was about who he thought I was.

He believed I was his ex-wife.

Jane.

I didn’t know that at first. I learned it later, in fragments. Through reports. Through testimony. Through the careful, measured language people use when they are trying to explain something irrational.

He thought I looked like her. Close enough that his mind filled in the rest. Close enough that he convinced himself I was her.

During the trial, he tried to convince everyone else too.

He said he believed I was Jane. He said he thought I had come back. He said it calmly, as if that explanation should make everything make sense.

It didn’t.

What unsettles me most is how easily the truth slipped out of reach. How quickly I became interchangeable. I wasn’t seen as a person. I was a projection. A stand-in for someone else’s obsession.

I wasn’t chosen.

I was mistaken.

There is a strange kind of anger in that. And a strange kind of grief. It means there was nothing I could have done differently. No choice I could have made that would have protected me.

It also means that even now, when people ask why this happened, there is no answer that feels complete. Just this uncomfortable truth: I was there. I looked right. And that was enough.

Knowing that doesn’t bring relief.

But it should remove one lingering question. Still, no matter what the doctors say, no matter what I try to tell myself, the feeling remains. It settles in my chest and refuses to leave.

It feels like it was my fault.

It wasn’t my fault.

How do I make myself believe that?