I will share a personal truth with you: darkness is not so intimidating once you've resided within its confines. I'm not talking evil, but a blackness that can dwell in your soul, lurking in suspicion and toying with your heart. It's a state of mind, a place where you view the world within its context. It leaves a mark on you that is as permanent as any scar and as deep as any wound. It crawls beneath your skin, indulges in pain, and scrambles reasonable judgment into chaos. I am not shy of it. I adopt it as any other part of the human experience, and I am not ashamed to call on it for inspiration. It is, after all, a component of my character. I would not be complete without it and so it is sewn into my life with a fragile Zen-like thread.
Ana Reinhardt has spent the last few years living alone, working as a medical receptionist at a local clinic, and getting back on her feet after dropping out of university and watching her family move to the other side of the world without her. She thinks she has moved beyond it all, beyond the depression and everything that followed it, but she still doesn't believe in love. When she begins dating one of the doctors she works with, she realises that maybe she does deserve a chance at a real relationship, and maybe her life doesn't have to be so lonely. With four close friends who think the world of her, she discovers that family comes in many forms, and while running away across the globe is a good short-term solution to dealing with pain, in the long run you have to find something bigger to hold onto in your heart or else it will all fall apart very quickly.