Content: Self harm (burning)

"So, Arthur, how have you been feeling?"

Arthur watches a fly crawl across the withered little plant on Dr. Kane's desk. In the background he can hear the clock ticking, counting out each empty minute. How has he been feeling? What has he been feeling? When he cards through the last two weeks in his mind it's like staring at a wall of solid white. He feels nothing, has felt nothing, will feel nothing.

Sometimes there's a stirring of frantic energy in him, a burst of color and movement behind his eyes and something boiling in his head. Sometimes he grits his teeth and digs his nails into his skin, his body mimicking an agony he barely registers. But there's no name for things like that, no crude drawing of a face on a chart that he can point to and say "I feel that one".

He rubs the sleeve of his sweater and wool scratches at the scabbed over burns on his arm. He's been told before that the urge to hurt himself proves he feels strongly, in intense, forbidden ways. Ways that make him dangerous and in need of help or punishment or both. But when he's doing it - lighting the same cigarette over and over so he can stub the sun-red ash out against his skin - he feels nothing.

The thrill of pain, the way fear jolts his body, the relief as blistering heat fades to tender warmth, the anticipation of doing it all over again; these are the emotions that he makes for himself. Every one of them a secret he has to cover in layers, like the holes he’s burned into his skin.

"I'm fine," Arthur tells her. He fits his cigarette between his lips and reaches down to dig his journal out of his bag.