Sam’s Journal of Survival

The Meeting

012826. This journal is fiction. The voice you’re reading is a character, not the author.

The Meeting

We met at a restaurant.

That detail stays with me more than the rest.

People eating. Silverware clinking. Wait staff moving between tables. Nothing about the setting suggested danger or fear or vigilance.

I ordered something simple. I remember the glass of water sweating onto the table. I remember thinking how strange it was to sit there talking about safety while life went on around us, uninterrupted.

No one was watching us. No one cared.

For that hour, I was just another person at a table, having a conversation.

My body noticed that.

It stayed present. It did not brace. It did not scan the room the way it usually does. It let the noise exist without assigning meaning to it.

That mattered.

Sometimes safety does not arrive as reassurance or protection.

Sometimes it arrives as normal.

And for a little while, normal was enough.