Sam’s Journal of Survival

After

012226. This journal is fiction. The voice you’re reading is a character, not the author.

After

For a long time after it happened, remembering was a physical act.

If I let my mind touch any part of it, my body would revolt. My stomach would turn. I would get sick. Waves of sadness came so fast and so hard that I could not control them. I would cry until I could not breathe. Sometimes I would shake. Sometimes I would fold inward, as if my body were trying to disappear.

Memory did not stay in my head. It lived everywhere else.

Touch was worse.

If anyone touched me, even doctors, my body would panic. I could not tolerate a man’s hands on me. My reaction came before thought, before reason, before reassurance. I would become hysterical, unable to stop myself.

My boyfriend had to endure seeing me like that. Seeing what the nights did to me. Seeing how little of me was left afterward.

The nightmares were not vague. They were precise. I relived what happened over and over, trapped in the same moments, the same terror. I woke screaming, already sobbing, already fighting something that was no longer there.

Nothing brought me out of it.

I could not be comforted. I did not want a hug. I did not want touch. I did not want soothing words or gentle hands. Nothing felt safe. Nothing reached me once the nightmares took hold.

I was stuck in loops that never resolved. Fear fed fear. Exhaustion fed despair. Each day felt like surviving only to face it all again at night.

There were moments when I thought about ending my life.

Not because I wanted to die, but because I wanted the horror to stop. It felt like the only certain escape from what my life had become.

I did not know then how to imagine a future beyond survival. I only knew how to endure the present, minute by minute, breath by breath.

I am still here.

I write that sentence carefully.

I am still here, not because it was easy, not because I was strong every moment, but because some part of me kept choosing to stay, even when I did not yet know what staying was for.

I endured.

I did finally reach a place where surviving became possible. I survived what he did to me, and going to court helped more than I expected.

Seeing him outside of the nightmare mattered. Seeing him small, disordered, delusional. Realizing that what I lived through came from illness, not omnipotence, brought a strange kind of relief.

The man was sick.

And now he is back out on the street.

That is the part no one prepares you for. The part where justice does not mean safety. Where the system closes its file and calls it finished, even though the fear is not.

I survived him.

I am still here.

And that has to be enough for now.