Lana Arwen Lazar

Part 1: Self-hatred

Lana Arwen Lazar loved to smoke. Now that may not sound bizarre, a 15-year-old smoking, but Lana's reasons for liking it were unique. She didn't really have any friends or peers to be pressured by, and she no longer had any parents to rebel against. Well, she had parents. Somewhere. But they weren't here. And they never could be here, so for all intents and purposes they might as well have been dead. No, Lana liked having something in her fingers, and when it wasn't a cigarette it was a gun. She liked having something in between her lips that wasn't her horrible chewed raw fingernails. She liked how the smoke looked, especially when it came out of her mouth in one big puff, and funneled out like a mushroom cloud.

And maybe mushroom clouds aren't the usual pleasantries that you'd find in a teenage girls head. And maybe a mushroom cloud is a unwelcome reminder that had fate decided differently the FAYZ could've been blown up by a hijacked piece of plutonium, but that threat was gone now. And mushroom clouds were just figments of her morbid imagination, which meant they weren't real, which meant they were a distraction. Because most of all what she liked about smoking was that it gave her something else to think about. Something else besides the inevitable darkness that she was terrified would swallow her.

That's what Lana was doing now, lying in her bed, sipping on a cigarette trying not to think about what she wasn't supposed to think about.

And she was failing.

For a second she wondered if smoking lying down, was a stupid thing to do. She could drop it, into her mouth and choke on it, or onto the bed and start a fire. Though the thought passed quickly; she only thought of safety now because of habit, not because of actual worry. If anything happened to her she could just heal herself. And if she was being honest death and pain no longer held the stigma that it once did. She sometimes found herself secretly wishing for it.

So Lana sat reclined, her head laying against the pillow, that was laying against the headboard. Her eyes were closed, a cigarette was propped in her mouth by her middle and forefinger like a 50's movie star. Except she badly needed a bath, her clothes were stiff with salt, and her hair was woven into a off kilter monstrosity of a rats nest. She doubted she could've been any less glamorous.

Her mind wandered, through pools of self-hatred, and self-pity, and more self-hatred because of the fact that she felt self-pity. And she knew it was happening. That she was so close. Verging on the edge of the darkness.

And it was then that there was a knock at the door.