After Mindoir, some of the other survivors and I were brought back to Earth. Since I under 18 and without any family to call me their son, I was quickly absorbed into "the system". Efforts were made to contact even distant relatives but in the end no one could be located. I assumed they too were deceased.

Initially, The Bridges Juvenile Center in New York City was to be my home until a foster home was found. Here I was placed amongst youth offenders who were charged with a wide assortment of crimes. My bed, to start due to overcrowding, would be a thin mattress in the open area that the staff maid great efforts not to call a "lock" lest it sound too much like a prison. Despite being one of the larger boys, I was immediately targeted for repeated attacks. I defended myself as best I could, and thankfully my affinity for hurting others had only been strengthened by the events on my home planet.

People were already reluctant to take in a damaged teenaged boy into their homes and my reputation as a fighter did not help matters.

Taking a troubled, very angry teenager into your home requires courage, and a certain amount of indifference. There was no 'raising' left to do. At the group home, I was enrolled in a decent enough school and visited a therapist's office where I would sit in silence for an hour each Tuesday. Staff at the home made sure I took my medication that was supposed to keep me from feeling depressed. Mostly, the meds just made me feel numb.

At 17, I had had enough of the system so I took the small bag of my belongings and left for the streets of New York without looking back. I stopped seeing my social worker, my therapist, stopped taking my meds, and started seeking out something to get rid of the numbness.

It's funny how one can go from perfectly normal to completely screwed up in such a short time. The removal of the stability that was my family shook me to my very core. I just wasn't the same person I was a mere year before. I didn't think, act, speak, or carry myself in any way that gave my former self away. I was someone new and I was just so very angry about everything.

One night, I was thrown out of a grungy bar on the lower west side, for the obvious crime of being underage and I quickly engaged the bouncer in a fight. He was bigger than I was, but I was faster and stronger and I had no sense of self-preservation. After beating his face to a pulp I was offered his job by the owner and a cot in the back.

The owner of the bar saw an opportunity in me and introduced me to his illegal bare-knuckle boxing racket, offering me free room and board and the occasional pittance of credits for fighting each week. I look back on it now and realize how awful that situation was, and how I was being exploited to hurt other people, but at the time I absolutely loved it. Fighting made me feel powerful and in control, and even when I took a beating or lost fight, it felt good.

The adrenaline rush gave me a euphoric high that I simply couldn't get enough. I was an addict and a junkie. An adrenaline junkie is somebody addicted to endogenous epinephrine. The "high" is caused by self-inducing a fight-or-flight response by intentionally engaging in stressful or risky behavior, which causes a release of epinephrine by the adrenal gland. It's like a shot of morphine directly to your heart.

Humans have always watched other humans fight each other for sport. A boxer is a modern day gladiator. We put two people in a cage and watch them beat the hell out of each other and this entertains us, because it is in our nature to fight each other, just not to the death. It's our way of posturing. Piranhas and rattlesnakes will bite anything and everything, but among themselves piranhas fight with raps of their tails, and rattlesnakes wrestle. Somewhere, during the course of such highly constrained and non-lethal fights, one of these intraspecies opponents will usually become daunted by the ferocity and prowess of its opponent, and its only options become submission or flight.

The feeling I got when I defeated my opponent was similar, but not nearly as powerful, to the one I got when I killed those batarians. I felt exhilarated, elated, euphoric and proud of what I had done. Even when I didn't win, the feeling of causing pain to another individual was enough. And in some sick twisted way, the beating I received in return felt just as good. I felt alive.

I had just turned 18, and I was fighting a rival of mine, a young man of 24, he was exactly an inch taller and had almost 25lbs on me. He earned the nickname "Ironhead" not from his good looks, but his propensity for being rather difficult to knock down. Neither of us had any formal training as fighters, we were simply dogs thrown into a pit to scrap for the amusement of others.

We danced around each other in our usual way, each posturing, making ourselves appear more aggressive than the other, probing for weakness. Being untrained, our matches were more or less street brawls.

Like always, he became frustrated and made the first move. He stepped in with his left foot and tried a powerful left hook, and my adrenaline high kicked in. Time slowed down and the next movements happened in seconds in the outside world, but felt much longer in my mind.

I tried to block but he was so strong, his hook got through. To withstand a hook, I clenched my jaw very tight and moved in to my attacker in order to make the punch land harmlessly away from me. I kept moving towards him and he jabbed hard with his right out of instinct. I took the punch with my forehead.

When someone punches you in the face, it hurts. But getting hit motivates me. It makes me punish the guy more.

My whole body moved with my right arm as it hurled itself up towards the underside of his chin. My uppercut landed with a crack and I knew I'd broken his jaw. He stepped back, his eyes no doubt wanting to burst out of his skull and I pinned him to the boards before he could fall, slamming my left fist into his kidney. He doubled over, but I held him up with my left hand at his throat, and brought my right hand back as I lined up my shot. My fist thundered down on his temple and I felt his body go limp.

I fell with him, my left hand still at his throat, my right hand still hurling towards his face over and over again. I felt his blood splatter against my face and my lizard brain rejoiced as I savoured every moment of it until I was hauled off his body by the referee and thrown into the corner. The world came back into focus and I watched Ironhead spit out blood and teeth.

I let my anger go every time I entered that pit, and each time I stepped back into the world it would instantly return. It seemed the better part of two years was spent searching for a way to release my anger and I found the most self-destructive ways to do so.

My high was gone, so I washed and dressed the cut above my eye and went in search of my next fix and sent a message to my friend Mara.

Mara was a sex worker in my neighbourhood and she had expected my call every Saturday night. She was a few years older than me, but her exact age was unknown, as she didn't like to share much information about herself. She had dirty blonde hair, dark eyes and was always chewing cheap penny candy bubble gum no matter the time of day. Her cheerful personality was surprising given her circumstances, but she explained to me that she could choose her clients, make decent money and had a plan to move on from sex work once she had enough credits to get off world.

The first time I engaged her services I was 17 and fresh onto the streets. Mara charged me 100 credits for an hour of her time and I was so nervous she just let me sit there and talk to her for an extra hour "on the house". Mara was my only friendly face in those years, even though I had to pay to see her. Eventually, I became comfortable enough and Mara and I engaged in a business relationship.

"Win or lose?" she would always ask, obviously preparing to tailor her services to the outcome of the fight. Losing always meant a little less talking and a shorter all around visit.

"Win." I typed back more often than not.

We would meet at her apartment and she would joke that people would start to think she was off the market with how often I would come around.

The strange thing was, I thought of Mara as a friend but never a girlfriend. I felt bad about paying to use her for just a physical relationship, but I knew she felt the same. She couldn't think of me as a lover or companion, I was simply a client. I thought it was simple but thinking back on it, having such an intimate sexual relationship without any other feelings of intimacy or connection was very unhealthy for me.

Sex is a natural and essential part of human life. But sex without intimacy left me feeling empty when the act was completed, much like defeating my opponent in the ring or, on a much stranger level, killing a Batarian. The rush was there in the moment but when the moment was gone, it felt like another piece of me had been chipped away.

It is not easy for me to admit this, but I was a user of people, women and sex workers in particular. I used them like a commodity for my own selfish purpose. That's who I was and I was not a good person. It took me a long time to come to terms with that.

The force of darkness and destruction within us is balanced with a force of light and love for others. These forces struggle and strive within the heart of each of us. To ignore one is to ignore the other. We cannot know the light if we do not know the dark.

I was in a very dark place for a long time, but thankfully, someone would try to show me my light.

I sat on the curb outside of the bar smoking a cigarette, and enjoying the cooling sensation of the drizzling rain when a man walked up to me. He got so close his legs were against my arms so when I tried to look up I had to lean far to my right to try to get a look at his face. Off balance, he had no trouble kicking me the short distance to the sidewalk causing me to lose my smoke.

"What the f-"

"What the fuck is right. Stand up."

"Fu-."

He kicked me in the ribs so hard I felt one of them crack. He bent over and I immediately recognized his face as the Lieutenant who had rescued me on Mindoir. David Anderson.

"You can stand up or you can stay down here and continue to get beat. Your choice."

I clutched at my ribs and looked up at him in confusion.

"Breaking my ribs isn't great motivation to stand."

"Oh really?" I saw him wind up for another but I caught his boot with my hands, and twisted his ankle causing him to drop to the ground. He laughed. "Good. You're a fighter. You'll need that."

"What are you talking about? What do you want?"

"I came to get you out of this shit hole you've found yourself in."

"I like this shit hole." I sat up and moved to sit against the wall while he did the same.

He brushed off the scuff on his boot with his finger. "You're better than this."

"And how would you know that?" My voice was dripping with disdain.

"Those boys we found under the fuel depot certainly thought so. Their brother Kyle thought so too."

My heart skipped a beat at the mention of Kyle's name. I felt genuinely happy for the first time in two years.

David reached into his pocket and pulled out the Zippo lighter I had given to Kyle, and he tossed it over to me.

"He wanted me to give you this. He was burned up pretty bad but he told me that you had saved him and his brother's lives."

I just kept moving the lighter around in my hand, feeling the cool metal against my skin, fighting the memories of the raid back while trying to let memories of my brother in.

"You're a leader. And a fighter."

"No I'm not. I'm a murderer." My fists started to ball. "I murdered those Batarians and I'd do it again and again."

"Sticking feathers up your ass does not make you a chicken."

The look on my face must have said it all because he laughed again.

"You killed, but you're not a killer. You're a kid who went through hell but you don't need to let it define you. You are better than this."

I remembered Anderson being there when they brought me to the rows of black bags, lined up so perfectly and uniformly in the hangar. He led me to her and pulled back the bag to reveal her unrecognizable face.

When someone cries so hard that it hurts their throat, it is out of frustration and knowing that nothing, no matter what you can do or attempt to do, can change the situation. When you feel like you need to cry, when you want to just get it out, relieve some of the pressure from the inside - that is true pain. Because no matter how hard you try or how bad you want to, you can't.

That pain just stays in place. Then, if you are lucky, one small tear may escape from those eyes that water constantly. That one tear, that tiny, salty, droplet of moisture is a means of escape. Although it's just a small tear, it is the heaviest thing in the world. And it doesn't do a damn thing to fix anything. Anger is so much more efficient.

"I want to kill them for what they did." I said quietly.

"Ask any soldier why he joined the military and no matter what they say, they've done so for selfish reasons. They wants to make the world a better place the only way they knows how. I'm not smart enough to be a doctor, I don't have the resources to cure world hunger, but I have a gift for leadership. I am an over achiever in the sense that I want to be the best at what I do. And yeah, sometimes what we do is kill.

"That is the basis of our profession. Everything else we might do, we are first and foremost trained to kill others. I look at you and I see that rage in your eyes. But I know that you don't really want to see the world burn. Deep down, you want to make it a better place the only way you know how. I think you're a leader, and I think you've got what it takes to be an exceptional soldier.

"I want you to think about this seriously. This will not be an easy undertaking. It will test you in every way you've ever thought possible, and then in ways you can't. It is a privilege and an honour to lead men to battle. Not everyone can do it. That's what makes us so different. It takes a certain type of person to do what we do, so they don't have to."

He sighed and stood and looked down at me. "Think. Take a hard look at yourself and make a decision. I'll be at the downtown station tomorrow morning at 0600 to catch a transport back to the Alliance, with or without you."

He started to walk away and then stopped and turned around. "You can stand up or you can stay down here and continue to get beat. Your choice."

Then he disappeared into the shadows and I went inside to pack my bag.