-- Sometimes stopping is the worst thing you can do.

  - Don’t get too drunk on adrenaline though.

  - Use everything to your advantage. Until you're safe.

  ---

  There’s this moment—right after the close call, when your lungs are burning, your hands are shaking, and everything’s either bleeding or bruised—but you’re alive.

  It’s electric.

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  I didn’t stop. Couldn’t. The moment I sat down, the weight would hit me. The fear, the grief, the loneliness. So I kept going right after I wrote the last entry. Scavenged three buildings back to back. Found canned peaches, a broken watch, a flare gun, and a pair of boots that actually fit.

  I laughed like a lunatic when they weren’t steel-toed. I hate steel-toed boots. They make you feel invincible, right until they trap your foot and trip you into a wall.

  I kept moving. Jumped from rooftop to rooftop. Parkour in the apocalypse, baby. Scraped my knee so hard I saw bone, wrapped it in a page from Jules’ favorite joke book. She hated slapstick.

  Momentum became my god. Motion meant life. I built momentum into a strategy, into a way of being. If I was a bullet, I couldn’t be stopped.

  But adrenaline’s a cheap drug. And withdrawal comes fast.

  When I finally stopped—like, actually stopped—I was halfway in an abandoned fire station, curled up next to a half-burnt fireman calendar from 2018, and my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

  Still.

  I was alive.

  High’s gotta wear off eventually. But while it lasts? You better ride it.