The Journal

When my father died, the only thing I asked for was his journal. My sisters wanted the fishing boat. My brother took his old watch collection. I took the battered black notebook that had spent years on his nightstand, mostly because I'd never seen him write in it. He wasn't the journaling type. He'd always said memories belonged in your head, not on paper.

The first page caught me off guard.

March 3

Someone has been standing across the street every night this week, usually around 6 PM.

Blue jacket. Baseball cap.

Doesn't move.

I frowned. The date was only about four months before he died. No one in the family had ever mentioned someone stalking him. The next few entries became stranger.

March 7

Saw him again. Pretended not to notice.

I think he tried coming inside my house.

Good thing I locked all the doors.

March 10

He followed me to the grocery store this time.

Every turn I made, he was there, following.

He even followed me home.

March 12

I think he wants me to know he's there.

I think he is taunting me.

I closed the journal and stared across my father's empty living room.

Every instinct told me it was nonsense. My dad had been an engineer for nearly forty years. Methodical. Rational. The kind of man who checked weather forecasts against three different stations because he didn't trust just one. Paranoia didn't fit him. I kept reading anyway.

March 15

He was at church this week, he kept looking at me and smiling a big grin.

March 16

I waved. He waved back.

I don't know why that unsettled me.

March 18

He knows my routine.

I saw him at the hardware store this afternoon.

Then again when I got home.

I don't think it was a coincidence.

March 21

I caught him looking through my front window.

I turned on the porch light and he smiled.

His teeth were sharp and his eyes were black.

I locked the door.

March 24

I almost asked him what he wanted.

But something told me not to.

April 1

I think he's been inside.

The dishes were washed.

April 9

He knocked today.

I was scared.

I stayed quiet until he left.

April 14

I called Susan.

I asked if she'd noticed the man.

She said no.

Either I'm imagining him...

Or he's only watching me.

April 25

My hallway light keeps flickering.

I keep thinking I am seeing a shadow walk past.

May 2

I found muddy footprints leading to the back door.

They looked familiar.

I can't explain why.

May 6

I saw him crying in his car.

He was parked across the street.

May 20

I found my television remote in the refrigerator.

Is he getting inside my house when I am gone?

May 13

He tried coming inside again today.

I yelled at him to go away.

My father's handwriting changed as the entries continued. The dates were jumbled and eventually he stopped dating them. The once-perfect letters became uneven, they got more frantic, said he was hiding in the pantry, the laundry room, in his bathroom. Sentences started to make less sense.

He came insid

I cant remember wat happn

i feelin less remembr

________

I not goig outsid I am going

________

don't think anyone see him

i think evil in soul

________

evil eyes dark evvel

Over the next week I finished the journal.

This demon man in the blue jacket appeared everywhere.

Outside restaurants.

Across parking lots.

At church.

There was one last coherent journal entry. Like he fixed whatever was plaguing his mind.

June 1

I told the man to stop.

I yelled at him and he started to cry.

WHO IS HE?????

Tomorrow I'll ask him why he haunts me.

There was no entry after that, Dad died the next morning. But there was a sketch of the man on the very last page. He had no face, but only a large smile with sharp teeth, wearing that damn jacket he always mentioned.

I finally asked my older sister. "Did Dad ever mention someone following him?" She looked confused. "No." She furrowed her brow and shook her head. "Anything about a… uhh a demon?"

She laughed. "What?" I slid the journal across the table and she read a few pages.

Her smile disappeared. "I've never seen this before." Neither had my brother. Neither had Dad's best friend. No one knew the journal existed. Something felt wrong. Did someone or something kill my father?

I couldn't sleep that night. Instead, I dug through old emails until I found one from Dad's doctor. It had been sent to him four months before he died.

The subject line read:

"Memory Care Consultation."

Mild cognitive impairment. Early dementia. The words hit harder now than they had then. I finally understood. The man who stopped by after work three or four times a week to check that he'd eaten dinner. To fix things around the house. To make sure he hadn't wandered off again. As his memory slipped, the familiar became unfamiliar. My father hadn't been inventing a stalker. He'd been seeing me. His own son. He stopped recognizing my face. But somewhere deep inside, he still knew I mattered.

So instead of writing, "My son came by today..."

He wrote...

"The man in the blue jacket was here again."

I did some research and found that other people with dementia start seeing demons or ghosts, or even people who aren't there. Faces start warping, faces begin appearing. They begin to think their loved ones are evil beings or have malicious intent.

I looked back through the pages, checking the dates. For sure, it was me. The sketch, that jacket, the pants, the shoes, they were mine.

I closed the journal, tears blurring the pages. Then something caught my eye. A folded piece of paper had slipped loose from the back cover. I'd never noticed it before. It wasn't in my father's handwriting.

It was mine. A note I'd written years earlier.

Dad, if you ever forget who I am, don't be afraid.

I'll keep coming back until you remember me.

I didn't remember writing it. Maybe because I'd written dozens like it. Maybe because forgetting was contagious in its own way.

I sat there for a long time with the journal in my lap. For months, I'd believed I was reading the story of a man being hunted. Instead, I'd been reading the story of a father trying to understand why a stranger cared enough to visit him every day all while losing himself and his mind. Eventually, he saw his own son as a demon, not someone taking care of him.

And somehow… even after he forgot my name, my face, he forgot who I was...

He never forgot to write about me.