Malik woke up in the hospital bed. Groggy, he slowly sat up and looked around to investigate the surroundings. It was a habit from his childhood. During the war, children would often wake up to find themselves in foreign surroundings. Sometimes, they would be kidnapped by army officials and find themselves sold off into slavery. Sometimes, other internally displaced refugees would find the children unconcious due to exhaustion on the roads, and take them with to the safer zones. Malik often found himself in such situations. It had become routine to faint, wake up, and analyse where he was. Usually he'd wake up in dirty, worn down houses or wet, dusty tents. It took him a moment to realise he was in no such place. He was in a clean, sterilised modern room. Because the war was over, and he was no longer in Syria. He could never get used to that. He found a needle inserted into his arm, connected to a tube that led to a box reading "IV fluid for dehydration". Quickly, almost instinctually, he ripped it off. A strange object was placed in his body. He knew it wasn't dangerous. But by the time he realised this, it was too late. His reaction was so sudden the needle sliced up to his wrist and then came out. He winced in pain as the wound began to bleed incessantly, not stopping even when he covered it with his other arm. He got up and trudged towards the window. He leaned against the wall and looked up at the night sky. It was cloudy and not a star was to be seen. The moon was without a trace. In the war, looking at the moon gave him both solace and despair. After his life was turned around and became nothing short of a fight for survival in an apocalyptic world, he had always felt as if everything was gone. His entire world changed, all that made up his life disappeared, his house and school and family and friends and the shopkeeper down the road and the huge canvas he had painted that hung on the living room wall. And he could do nothing about it. Seeing the moon during those times, unchanged and rotating in its apparently never-ending orbit around the Earth, changing its shape without regard for the war or the orphans or the martyrs or the wounded. That gave Malik reassurance, that even the smallest hint of his previous life remained existent and unchanged. Simultaneously, it devastated him. Nothing was in his control. No matter how hard he tried, the war wouldn't stop, nobody wouldn't come back to life, and the moon would go through its many phases, and it was all irrespective of what Malik did. If the moon was not visible one night, it would never become visible that night, even if Malik cried and begged. It was never up to him.

He thought of Liam. He thought of his face. It was accidental and sudden and lasted only a fraction of a second, but it was enough to drive Malik into a spiral of sorrow he forgot he was capable of. The world turned black and Malik slid across the wall to the ground. The bleeding and the pain of the wound on his arm were still there, but they dulled as he agonised. The thoughts were unbearable. For him, pain had always been a method of distraction from psychological misery. But this time, the pain was too dull, his sadness too overwhelming. He desperately wanted to increase the pain. He bit his hand as hard as he could. He could feel the recently healed bone twitch, and the blood vessels burst in disarray. Doctor Miriam told him before not to, that it was an unhealthy coping mechanism and that increasing pain is not a good way to deal with sadness, that he should write his feelings down instead. But he felt too depressed to "better himself" or follow Doctor Miriam's advice. He'd bit his hand for much longer than he'd written down his feelings. It came to him more naturally. 

Malik first bit his hand when he was 8. When he found out his mother had passed and that he was finally alone without a person in the world to call close. Back then, upon hearing the news, he first clenched his teeth so hard that their edges broke off as they screamed with dismay. He writhed in pain. So he tried to increase this by digging into his palm with the remaining teeth. As he pressed harder, it hurt more, the pain spreading from his teeth into the tissues of his palm. Harder, until he felt his jaws gnashing into his bones and tearing them apart, all to lose his sanity because it would have caused him to think back to his mother. And it worked. He felt so much pain that day that it washed away his grief and he excused every tear he wept that day as being tears of superficial, physical pain. He knew that if he had allowed himself to cry for his mother, he wouldn't stop until the day he died. So he hurt himself to escape. He'd used it since, whenever the misery became too much to bear. He never lasted more than a few months without resorting back to tearing at his wounds, bleeding his fists dry, or any other means that pained him enough to crumble away at the part of his "self" that was agonising. It never stopped working. Contrary to his expectations, pain never became more tolerable, no matter how much of it Malik subjected himself to. Now as well. The unbearable pain quickly expanded to become tenfold his suffering. Malik realised many years ago that his sadness was never decreased by the pain. Instead, what happened was that the pain would become so much bigger relative to his sadness that it overloaded his capacity to "feel negative emotions", and thereby overshadowed his sorrow. But for some reason, today, his likely broken wrist, torn arm and aching teeth seemed still not to compensate for the sheer devastation he felt. He ripped at the long wound formed by the needle, it coloured his entire shirt red. He teared up and cried silently but couldn't tell whether his cries were out of pain or grief.