The Price Of Humanity

Chapter One

On an eventful day in 1976, the stars in the sky aligned so perfectly that it was possible for the birth of a child to occur. But it wasn't just any child - the child was Arianna Morandi, the girl who would be known by all but also known by none.

Her life was colorful - Technicolor bursts of raw emotion and event bled through the photograph that was her life: the death of her father at age six; her dissolution into normalcy by age nine; and the sudden, painful onset of depression at age ten, caused by the maturity of her mind, still processing the events that led to the sudden disappearance of her beloved father four years prior.

And by 1989, at age thirteen, Arianna was so lost in her own rabbit-holes of despair and melancholia that her fingers began to rest on the all-important self-destruct button.

It happened unexpectedly: a sudden wave of hormones drowning in her bloodstream told her once and for all that her life was a life not worth calling a life. She sat in her shockingly pink bathtub, picked up the safety razor and, without a second thought, sliced through the skin in her wrists. She yelped sharply as the scarlet fluid flowed out of her veins. The pain was fiery - hot, unbearable pain that she couldn't reverse. She expected to feel regretful, but no such feelings surfaced. Then the blood stopped draining, and she fell into a void of nothingness that she had longed for for so many numb, bleeding years.