The Day Fear Wouldn’t Leave

Day 12 — December 5, 2025

I’m not even sure how to talk about today. It was Friday. That’s about the only neutral fact I have. Everything else felt like a tight, shaking breath I couldn’t release.

I still haven’t heard anything. Nothing from the detective. Nothing about the case. Nothing about the man who changed my life in ways I never asked for. And silence is its own kind of violence when you’re trying to heal.

I’ve been living in fear all week. Fear that sits in my chest, fear that keeps scanning windows and hallways, fear that lives under my skin like a second heartbeat. The kind of fear that doesn’t need imagination, because it’s tied to someone real. Someone dangerous. Someone who hurt me more than once and walked back into my life months later just to remind me he could.

This man knows where I live. The walls know that. The floors know that. My nervous system knows that too well.

And even though the authorities are pursuing him, there’s a part of me that keeps wondering what if he gets away with it? What if he finds out? What if he comes back?

I hate that this is my reality. I hate that my home, the first place I’ve ever lived truly as myself, became a place where I flinch at every sound. It was supposed to be my beginning. My fresh start. My safe space.
Instead, it became a cage. A battleground. A memory of everything I’ve survived.

There have been moments of happiness in this apartment and they were real. But so was the panic. So was the dread. So was the constant scanning of shadows, locks, out windows, and down stairwells.

And I’ve had to face all of it in a version of hell I didn’t choose. No escape route. No easy way out when my body screamed to leave. When your brain tells you you’re in danger, having no way to physically get away is its own form of torture.

That man threatened me months after the assaults. Came to my home. Reminded me of what he could do. And I’ve been living in the aftershock ever since. Terrified to speak, terrified to move, terrified that telling the truth would cost me my life.

This past year destroyed me. Completely. I don’t sugarcoat that. I don’t pretend it was “for growth” or “part of the journey.” It broke me. It stripped things from me I can’t get back. It reshaped my nervous system, my routines, my identity, my sense of safety, my trust in the world.

Today all of that weight sat on me at once. The silence. The waiting. The memories. The fear. The anger. The exhaustion of surviving something no one should ever have to survive.

I feel equal parts sad, furious, and lost. Sad for the girl I was before this. Furious at the man who decided her body was his to take. Lost in the space between who I’ve been and who I’m trying so desperately to become.

But even in the fear, even in the sadness, even in the fury, one thing is still true. I’m here. Breathing. Writing. Refusing to disappear.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And a spine that refuses to break even when today tried to bend it in half.