Afterword

The story is over, but Jack isn't finished. He steps out from behind the microphone to offer his own theory of where Zachariah ended up, the philosophy he reached for to make sense of it all, and what carrying this story for years taught him about being alive.

He's new now. He's meeting the world now. He has a purpose now. He feels it in his bones. He doesn't want to do it, but feels that he must do it. There's no one else who will do it. So he must. He's no longer drifting. He moves with precision, with confidence that what he's doing, is helping the world. But the closer he gets to his goals, the closer he feels to the end.

He's far from home now. In a place that doesn't know his name. He tries to remake himself from fragments of his past. For a moment, adaptation almost feels like rebirth. Then tragedy arrives, and his foundation is shattered. He desperately looks for possibilities. But somewhere inside the wreckage, he makes a decision: if he must continue, he will no longer be carried by the weight of his past. But his awakening does not come gently.

He rides off, in search of a new life. He learns new skills, new rhythms, new ways of seeing beauty in the ordinary. But still, he is drifting more than choosing, watching the sun pass over him rather than truly meeting it. Then, just as he starts to find meaning in his work, it all falls apart and he is catapulted into the next life waiting for him.

Alone now, he mistakes independence for freedom. He gets lost in a chemical oblivion, into violence, into the strange comfort of becoming someone hardened by the streets. For a time, it gives him purpose and belonging, until the thing that made him feel alive begins to show him how close he is to death.

Before the world had teeth, he was only a child. Carefree, unguarded, alive in the soft illusion that life isn't so bad. Then he started to see the cruelness of life and it started to change him. Then something awful happens, a rupture that divides everything into before and after.