"How are you?"

I stared at the gray old man sitting across from me. Three days. They had shoved pills down my throat, stuck me in some little "happy" room and watched over me like hawks to make sure I didn't chop off my hands. I felt nothing short of sick and worthless.

Everything in my life was gone: My mom, Mike, Penny, my friends. I didn't even get to keep cocaine; it was replaced with pills that did nothing other than make me puke.

"Just peachy," I said through gritted teeth. My therapist just stared at me. His eyes were an unnatural shade of light blue-- ridiculously noticeable in the office decorated in last decade's style. Wood panelling. Dark wood panelling that drained every ounce of light out of the room.

"Lying's a sin, Dakota," he said from across his dark desk. "You need to stop lying to me and yourself and turn to the Lord."

"I don't give a fuck about --" I was cut off by my stomach twisting painfully. "Can you guys not force me to pop pills? My stomach doesn't appreciate them."

His unsettling gaze was locked on me. I pulled my legs up onto the chair, hugging them in an attempt to make my insides stop hurting. It wouldn't help, of course; everything hurt, but it was a different kind of hurt. Medicine didn't make that kind of hurt go away. I was being dragged into the depths of hell by losing everything in my life. Hell was probably nicer than this Jesus-spewing place of "godliness" and it might even have coke!

I felt a smile tugging at my lips, but it was gone almost instantly. Heaven didn't exist, so neither did hell. What was the point of even thinking about it?

"We'll change the dose, then," he said as he wrote something down on his legal pad. "Dakota, you need to look inside yourself and stop lying. Let's try again: How are you?"

"I done told you, I'm just damn peachy," I snapped at him, raising my chin from my knees just so I could raise my voice. "Although I'd feel a lot better if you let me go back to my little depressing room and rot away until they take me to actual rehab. I'm fucking sick of this Jesus talk; I want to go back home and..." I trailed off. He had gotten to me.

No one would have been able to do that before. I grabbed a tissue off of the therapist's desk and pinched my nose. Cocaine was the thing that made me able to conquer the world, to deal with any problem. With Mom and Mike gone, it was exactly what I needed right now. But I didn't have anything or anyone.

It was all gone.

Cure-all miracle drugs don't exist for normal people, but if a person was just willing to go over the edge... There was a cure-all for everyone.

"And what, Dakota?" His voice was like some kind of robot. So were his questions. Some little fucking drone working for the government. Who cared what he knew? He didn't fucking care what I had to say. He'd just go home to some kind of depressing homelife and stare at the wall all day after he worked.

"And do a thousand lines of coke!" I screamed at him, "That was the one thing holding my world together. It's the only thing I had to keep me sane-- it made my life worth living! My mom's gone. Mike's gone. I don't even have my fucking car anymore! I have nothing. Even you have a job and a fucking house. I'm left to die by the state!"

He was so calm. He just sat there while my voice got louder; while I stopped in the middle of sentences to sob. I had to uncurl myself from the chair to scream at him. I totally forgot about needing to puke.

I wanted to wrap my hands around his little scrawny neck. He probably wasn't even a person. The government probably had little robot therapists sent into detox facilities to act like therapists. There's no way a normal person's eyes could be that blue.

"You're not even a real person! You're just some kind of Star Wars droid in human skin sitting there taking in all your info in some kind of VHS tape for the government to see! You and your fucking camera eyes can go melt in hell."

He scrawled something on his paper.

"I want my life back. I want to have never shot that guy. I..." I couldn't keep talking. I curled back up in the chair.

Too fragile. If he could get to me, then who else could? Someone like me didn't even deserve to exist. It was survival of the fittest in the world and a girl who would breakdown just because some robot asked a simple question had no place in it.

"Dakota, you have Forrest to live for."

Everything stopped. Just for a moment. Everything.

I reached into the pocket of the shorts I was wearing. My fingers brushed the sharp edge of the Polaroid of Forrest.

Inhale. The world came flooding back.

Forrest.

"No." I said simply. My grandparents would never take me back. Jordan would be Forrest's family now. I wasn't ever going to be anything in his life. I wasn't going to be anything in anyone's lives. Just another sweaty, smelly whore roaming the streets of Vegas. Nothing was left. Not even Forrest could make me change.

"We're done for today, Dakota." He closed his notebook. "We've made some progress."