My Stalker Was Waiting for Me in the Woods

It was like a scene from a Lifetime movie

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

It started with an email.

There was nothing special about the message. It wasn’t overly interesting, excessively friendly, or anything else that would have triggered my mental caution button.

It was just an email.

I still had Myspace, although I didn’t use it often. When I saw I had an email from somebody named Triple C, I browsed my account to see if anything rang a bell. Lots of people used nicknames online, and my email address was listed on my profile.

“Hey Missy, what’s up?”, the email read. “I’m having a party with some old friends. Can you come?”

I realized Triple C was a guy I used to work with named Cameron— 7 years ago. He seemed like a nice enough guy back then, and although I had no intention of going to his party, I wrote back, “Sure, I’ll try to stop by.”

Back then I had a hard time telling people no, so I felt like saying I’d try to come was the polite thing to do. I made a bit of small talk, asking how he was doing and how his life was going. We had a few mutual friends, and Cameron asked about them as well.

Again, nothing out of the ordinary. Thanks to social networking, I received random emails like this all…