Darya Smirnov

Forest

Born in St Petersburg in Russia to Vesna and Feliks Smirnov, Darya was raised in the bustling Russian city until the age of 11 when she and her family moved to Florida, USA.

Growing up as the younger twin, Darya always felt like she was an afterthought. While her brother was loud, brash and attention seeking, she kept to the background out of the way of problems and maintained a level of reclusiveness. As her interests developed and her atypical personality grew bold, she struggled to maintain the appearance of the well behaved, perfect daughter her father expected her to be and a war between the perfect and the stage began to fester inside her heart.

Darya picked up English quickly and managed ways to hide her accent from detection, knowing that her classmates would only bully her for that as well. She was regularly called a 'freak' and a 'bitch' by the other kids but never fought back, she kept it inside and pushed it down. Her father told her that loud women cause problems and internalised that.

An American highschool didn't help calm the rageful fire within her. She rocked up to class wearing colourful rainbow turtleneck shirts and bright dunagrees, sweaters with dinosaur designs and shorts with sewn on patches from her favourite bands while the other kids chose to keep their fashions nondescript. She wore her heart on her sleeve.

She worked odd jobs all over the city to get as much money together as possible to help her family as they went into financial turmoil, but since she was known as the weird freak no one gave her any work. She felt like a failure, and no one other than her brother there to tell her otherwise.

At the age of 15, Darya's rage switch flicked on as her father began to physically abuse her, her brother and her mother. She had regular PTSD triggered flashbacks in school as well as panic attacks and spent most of her school day isolated in the school chemistry department mixing acids and bases. She began to eat lunch alone in a bathroom stall as people gossiped the latest drama and arranged to go to the mall outside. The closest person she had to a friend was Beatriz Ramos, but it was clear that she favoured her brother over her.

Her father's abuse continued until she was 17 and a half years old, when a neighbour overheard one of the instances of violence and called the police who arrested his father who was later sentenced. A few days after her 18th birthday, her parents got legally divorced.

She worked hard to escape high school no matter what to escape her town, her family and her reputation as that weird kid who no one wanted to speak to. She put in the work, staying at the library every night and scored late night tutorting with one of her teachers. Eventually she opened up to her teacher about all of her anxieties and trauma and was finally able to vent out her rage and embrace her weirdness.

As she started at the state's top university for Chemistry, Darya began to take anti-anxiety medication as well as attending therapy to work through her childhood trauma.

University went by in a breeze. She kept top of her class but did everything alone. She was invited to one party, but after accidentally getting too comfortable in sharing her weird side and bringing up The Human Centipede to her classmates, she gained a reputation for being a downer and wasn't invited to any more. She joined the gardening and needle appreciation societies and hung out with her lecturers after class to learn more about Chemistry. They became close and she was gifted an ornate, one of a kind distillation funnel.

Upon graduation, she worked for the university as a junior technician for a short while before being offered the opportunity to complete a fully funded PhD at a downtown hospital where she would work to help ease the patient's pain, especially those with chronic or live shortening illnesses.

One of the worst days of her life was when a scraggly paediatric nurse broke into her lab without permission searching for a specific medicine and broke her prized funnel into a million tiny irreplaceable pieces. She snapped at him and even threw a couple of empty plastic trays at his head as he scampered pathetically out. She held the broken pieces in her hands, the symbol of the first person to ever understand her weirdness, and couldn't stop the tears that followed. However, the next morning there was a similar new funnel on her desk with a sorry note. It wasn't the same... but she appreciated the gesture. Maybe this Nurse Leon wasn't a total dick afterall.

For weeks afterwards, she felt like she was being constantly watched, as if she was purposefully being spied on but discounted it as simple paranoia. A few days after, when her colleagues once again attended a quiz night without her, the same nurse from before waltzed in cockily and started to lecture her about how nursing was a more impactful field than chemistry. As first she was shocked and an argument soon followed. They argued all night into the morning about the smallest little details, pointing out discrepancies and flaws in each other's logic and only stopped when her co-workers came back with dreadful hangovers. It was only then that she realised why he'd done all that. She hadn't felt lonely for one second.

She learnt the nurses' name, Tauro Leon, and arranged for an argument rematch. From then on, they became the closest of friends... but as a scientist she couldn't help but hypothesise why her heart rate picked up a few more beats when he was around.