Five years had passed since the day I finally recognized myself again. It still felt unreal to me that any of it had happened at all. That entire sequence of events had happened over only three days, but it felt like an eternity. I had spent seventeen years frozen in place, and all it took was three days to change everything.

A lot has happened since then. It was a media circus once the news got out. No one thought that there was anyone still left inside the ruins. The area had long since been quarantined and fenced off from the public. I hadn’t known this at the time, but the area was both contaminated and unstable from the impact. Whatever wasn’t poisoned was slowly sinking into the ground. When it came down to it, I had been lucky to survive at all.

The unthinkable had occurred, and the community was shaken by it. News crews buzzed around the premises, talking about how the contamination levels had dropped significantly over the years but the area was still too unstable to rebuild on. Governmental groups worked with charity organizations to search the quarantine zone to find any other survivors still holding out in the wreckage.

As it turns out, there were three survivors in total. One was a man hiding out in an underground bunker. He was convinced that the war was still raging on, and he was fiercely determined to stay until they brought out his family to tell him themselves. The other two were a married couple. They had been determined to die in the same place they had lived for the past fifty years, not even death could take them from the place they called home.

I suppose I should have been relieved that I wasn’t the only one crazy enough to stay behind, but if anything, it made me feel more foolish. All that time, I had been convinced that I might have been the last person left in the world, and I wasn’t even the only person left for three square miles. It all goes to show you how far the mind will go to protect the psyche from what it cannot bear.

The monsters I had heard banging on the walls and doors were inside my head all along. I must have invented them to justify why I couldn’t leave. And there is a bittersweet irony to that chain of events. I resented my mother for being both unwilling and unable to move on after my father passed away, but I was also unable to move on after she did. We were the same – like mother, like son…

I had blinders on; I busied myself with pointless tasks that didn’t matter to keep myself from seeing what was right in front of me. I wasted my life holding onto the illusion of better days that had long since passed. The house didn’t need me. Even the plants my mother used to love didn’t need me either. They were happy enough with just the rain; I was just trying to make myself feel useful and keep her alive in some small way.

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I never needed to come back to the house, and I certainly didn’t need to stay. It was entirely self-destructive. In the end, my mother wouldn’t have wanted me to live like that either, but I couldn’t accept the guilt of being unable to save her or the guilt of resenting her for something she might not have been able to control.

There is a unique pain in a situation where there is no clear aggressor. There wasn’t a villain in my story. Both of us were victims, and both of us were in pain. Since there was no one for me to lash out at, I took it out of myself. After all, self-hatred is just anger turned inward at oneself.

A few weeks after I was rescued, another pivotal memory came back to me. That was not the first time I had made it as far as the fence. I had tried once before. There was a time, years earlier, when I had almost left the perimeter. That day, I had been so fed up that I stuffed a backpack with a wire cutter and headed out. I had been fueled by such a fire until I had finally finished clipping my way through the fence.

It had felt more painful to admit that I had wasted all those years of my life than to continue to wallow in my self-induced isolation. In that moment, right before I crossed the boundary line, a single question flickered through my head: “Who would I be on the other side?” And when I couldn’t answer that simple question, I betrayed myself. I lost my nerve and turned around.

Change is often more terrifying than any monster could ever be. I ran from invisible monsters that only existed in my grief. I was miserable squatting in a dilapidated house, but at least it was familiar. It was “normal” to me, and the future outside of that perimeter was strange and foreign. I couldn’t see what wasn’t mine yet.

That experience taught me something valuable. I just wish I hadn’t learned it in the worst way possible. The first is that we must be willing to face ourselves and reality, no matter how painful it may be. The second is that we are social creatures who were never meant to be alone. And lastly, I learned the answer to my question from the first time I tried to leave.

Who am I on the other side? My name is Victor Lewis. I am just a man, and my strength is my weakness. I may be battered, but I am no longer lost. I may be broken and bruised and damned, and so is so much of the world, but I take solace in the fact that we are all reaching up for the sky together. Sometimes the dam must break before the sun can rise.

Fortunately, the community and several assistance programs rallied together to help me get back on my feet. I am not afraid to admit that I needed help. It is not weakness to be vulnerable and lean on others who are reaching out their hands towards you. No, it would be foolish to push them away. Don’t get me wrong; I still have bad days, but they are still getting better. Whatever you believe in, whether it is God, fate, or luck, I have been handed a second chance at life, and I will not waste it.