Lazarus...

Inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and written with prose inspired by Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

"Awake, become reborn again another day. Free your grip from Hypnos, the sleep God, free yourself from him and stand. Lazarus, awaken." - Chapter 2: The Daily Commute

In the heart of San Francisco, among monuments to wealth and progress, walks Lazarus-a man at war with himself. Torn from his childhood home in the infamous and impoverished Tenderloin neighborhood after his mother's death, he was thrust into the hands of "devout" guardians who taught him to look down upon the very people he grew up around.

After a life changing near-death encounter with a drug-raddled gunman, something within his psyche crumbles. Thinking, thinking, thinking, that is all he can do in the chaotic world that is his mind. Broken ideologies, the idea that he is better than those he grew up around, are destroyed and in its place is the loudness of the hopeless loneliness he has been surrounded with for his entire life. No one is there for him, and now he feels it.

His mind sinks deeper and deeper into madness. There is no light for him. Where is his second chance? The original Lazarus found himself risen from the dead, but now this Lazarus, the false Lazarus, feels none of the love that he deserves. Where does his destiny lead? Does he steer it himself, or is it rogue and gone asunder? He does not know, yet he searches for the answer.