And he does.

A few days later Yixing is lying in bed watching a movie on his laptop when the same face pokes into his room. He’s got his right arm holding a crutch, the other one balancing two big cups of red jello on top of one another and the familiar beaming smile.

••••••••

Days turn into weeks. It doesn’t take long for Yixing and Kris to become good friends. They meet regularly in the courtyards or in each other’s rooms, getting to know each other fairly quickly. Yixing learns that Kris loves drawing, but judging by his sketchbook, is an awful artist, hates school but loves basketball and is currently in rehab, learning to walk again on his mutilated half-leg.

In return, Yixing tells Kris all about his disease because there’s not much else to Yixing to talk about. How he can’t sweat or cry (his body doesn't differentiate temperature), how he has to always eat slowly (so that he doesn’t accidentally bite through his tongue), how he’s not allowed to play sports (because he’s always constantly and unknowingly injuring himself), how the doctor’s say he’s now at risk for some bone disease (because his repeated traumas are slowly destroying the tissues in his joints), how neither the doctors nor his mom knew what to do about him.

(But then again no one really did).

He doesn’t repeat the latter to Kris, however.

There was a strange comfortableness about their friendship. It wasn’t like the typical teenage bromance that was premised upon nailing hot girls, video games and cars. There was a mature aura to Kris that was easy to be around and a homelike familiarity about him that made Yixing felt as though he had known Kris for a lifetime. Their conversations were sporadic, as both preferred to enjoy each other’s company rather than pry into each other’s lives.

Yixing and Kris didn’t exchange many words with each other because it simply wasn’t needed. Comfortable silences can be just that – comfortable.

A mutual understanding existed between the two. Yixing and Kris never said it, but they knew that they were worlds apart.

For pain was a foreign and unattainable dream for Yixing. He didn’t dwell on it much, but on some days when he was watching the NBA with Kris or when Kris was hurting so much his face would turn a sickly pale and his head was wet with sweat, Yixing would wonder. He would recall the times he felt the twist of an ankle, the oozing of blood from a cut or the snap of a bone and found himself longing for something, anything other than just a physical sensation.

It was silly really, for Yixing was yearning for something that was an impossibility. He was missing something he never had.

 Yet Yixing’s dream was a daily reality for Kris because the ache was not only in his leg, but in his heart as well. Kris had told Yixing how, when the pain was new and the wounds still fresh, he had lashed and pushed away those closest to him – with their bright lives and hopeful futures- out of his life. His jealousy was severe, spreading like an epidemic within him. He told Yixing about his lost scholarships, his shattered dreams, and his unpredictable future.

But Kris was fighter, and Yixing couldn’t help but admire him. Broken, shattered, fragmented Kris gluing himself back together piece-by-piece. And Yixing was now there, ready to hold him steady in place until the glue had set and he was a little more whole again.

This was the ironic paradox of their relationship.

For Kris was slowly building himself back up, yet Yixing was forever breaking himself down.

Or was it the other way around?

••••••••

It’s a fairly warm summer afternoon.

Kris is lying in his hospital bed, Yixing sitting next to him. They’re watching TV, Kris has his sketchbook out and is scribbling away between ad breaks. Light was still filtering through his closed curtains.

There’s another ad break on, and Kris is back at it again with his signature array of farfetched doodles that are god-awful but somehow charming at the same time. They’d normally be in the gardens however Kris was bedridden after a couple hours of particularly strenuous rehab.

Kris rolled over slightly to grab a drink that was sitting next to them on the table, wincing as he rolled back.

Yixing looked at Kris’ leg curiously. It was unfathomable something could make someone hurt so much. But then again he didn’t even understand what being hurt felt like.

“What’s it like, Kris?” Yixing finally asks. It was a question he’d wondered for as long as he could remember.

What’s it like feeling pain?

“What’s what like?”

Yixing points to Kris’ thigh, “that.”

“What do you mean?” Kris’ eyes don’t leave his sketchbook, his pencil scratching line after line into the paper.

“You know what I mean,” Yixing retorts a bit too quickly back, unable to hide the hindrance of annoyance in his voice. Kris notices this, stops drawing and looks up to meet Yixing’s gaze.

“Six.”

“Sorry?”

“It’s living a six.”

“I don’t get it.”

“The doctors here are always asking me to rate my pain on a scale. One being the least, ten being the worst.”

“Right.”

“And it’s always at least a six, sometimes getting as bad as ten. So I guess having this,” Kris ran his hand up and down his thigh gently, “is like living a six.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” because it all meant nothing to Yixing. If the doctor’s had asked Yixing the same question they might as well be asking, “on a scale of one to ten, how bad is your nothing?”

“I don’t know. I guess it’s kind of like a reminder, everyday, that I’m still," Kris’ voice trails off, his drifts away as he stares out the window, “alive”. He quickly goes back to staring at his sketchbook, except this time his hands aren't moving.

“It's like having a big, loud, annoying alarm clock every morning," he looks at Yixing again, "GOOD MORNING. GUESS WHAT. YOU’RE STILL ING ALIVE! And your aliveness today is at least a six!”

“So what does that make me then, if I can’t feel it?”

Dead?

“Impossible, Yixing. Everyone feels pain.”

“My disease would say otherwise.”

“Your disease is wrong then.”

“What?”

“Here, let me show you” he says, and flips his sketchbook to a clean page. He draws a long double-ended arrow that stretches across the paper, and places dashes (very unevenly) along it. He then labels the dashes ‘one’ through to ‘ten’.

“What’s the feeling you like feeling the most?” Kris asks, he doesn’t look at Yixing but is focused on the paper. Fingers ready to write.

The question seemed juvenile.

“Umm… being happy I guess?” and Kris chuckles, but writes down ‘happy’ at the first dash labeled ‘one’.

“And what’s the worst feeling you’ve ever felt?” he turns his head to look at Yixing now, rather inquisitively with his big eyes. Yixing shifts uncomfortably in his seat, sitting on his hands and averting eye contact to look at the floor.

“Fear, I guess?” after a long pause. Kris chuckles a bit, but stops when he sees Yixing’s icy glare.

“Fear, why?”

He was terrible with words, he didn’t know how to adequately articulate the type of fear he meant. The type that he first encountered when he was six years old, when he found his father lying on motionless in their home. Skin cold, heartbeat barely a murmur. The type of fear that smothered him, dragging him deeper and deeper into a pit of nothing; the type that swallowed him whole and left him numb and breathless, while he screamed and screamed for his father to wake up.

"My dad..." Yixing squeaks out, "I was six, I found him..." his voice trails off, for some reason words felt like they were stuck in his throat. He gulped hard, mouth dry.

Kris fell silent. He put a comforting hand on Yixing’s shoulder, signifying that he didn’t need Yixing to finish his sentence.  He understood.

“I’m sorry man, I didn’t mean to pry,” Yixing nodded. There was a long pause.

“Hey well, I guess we have that in common too. Our dads, I mean. And being stuck here.”

“He died too?”

“Not exactly.”

“Huh?”

“Well, he left mom and me when I was eight, and I haven’t seen or heard from him since. He could be dead; he could be remarried, he could have joined a gang. I don’t know. One day he was there carrying me on his shoulders and taking me to buy ice cream and the next day him and mom are screaming at each other, and suddenly he’s walked out the door with his suitcase and driven away. I was still too young to understand what was happening. But just like that, poof. Gone. Not a word for nearly ten years.”

Silence again. Yixing didn’t know what to say. In a way, he thought he was much luckier with Kris. At least with his father, there was certainty. Though he often felt an inexpressible level of emptiness sometimes, particularly on Father’s Day or his birthday, he was used to being without a dad he couldn’t imagine what it would have been like growing up with one. Kris was different. Yixing wondered how many times birthday wishes Kris wasted as a child or how many times he ran to answer the door, ready to leap into the arms of the man he loved so much only to be disappointed again and again.

“His loss.”

“Huh?”

“I mean, his loss for leaving you...”

Because why would anybody want to leave you?

Kris looks at Yixing again, and smiles sadly. Reaching over he ruffles Yixing’s hair comfortingly, silky strands gliding through his long slender fingers.

“Thanks, Xingxing.”

Another pause of silence.

“We don’t have to keep going if you don’t want to.”

“No, it’s okay.”

I want to understand pain. I want to understand you.

“Are you sure?” Yixing nods.

“Okay, we’ll say happy is the best and fear is the worst. What’s worse after fear?”

“Regret. Definitely regret.”

“Then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think.”

Yixing closed his eyes and thought about his dad.

“Failure. Losing someone. Loneliness…”

“Wow Yixing, this sounds so morbid.”

“Sorry.”

“No I’m joking, keep going. What’s after?”

“I don’t know. Being embarrassed?” Kris laughs.

Like how he felt right now.

“What about happy, what’s the next best feeling after being happy?”

“Laughing? Is that a feeling?”

“Not quite but that’ll do. Keep going.”

“Being grateful I guess.”

Like how he felt to have Kris as a friend.

“And being content. You know, just being kind of happy with everything?”

“Alright,” and Kris quickly scribbles down the remaining words into his diagram.

“There, how does this look?” he asks, handing the notebook over to Yixing. He studies it carefully.

Pain was nothing more but a concept to Yixing. It was an idea, this notion in his mind that it was something that everyone felt when something happened to them that wasn't "good". Because pain isn't good. Or so he'd been told. He never understood why the girl in kindergarten cried when she fell and grazed her knee, he didn’t understand what migraines were or why they forced his mother into a nearly comatose state once every couple of months, he couldn’t even begin to comprehend what having dying muscle being cut from your leg would have felt like.
 

The diagram was messy and perhaps childish – some words were out of place and didn’t make a lot of sense. But for the first time, the murkiness in his head started to clear a little.

Pain was something that everyone felt and carried with them, some physically and some in other ways.

Some carried pain in several ways, like Kris.

“Here,” Kris says as he rips out the page and passes it to Yixing, “so you can remind yourself.”

“So I guess, on most days you’re “lonely” and on really bad days you’re ‘fear’?”

“Yeah.”

Yixing closed his eyes briefly. He thought of the void he felt before he met Kris, he thought of his dad. 

“That bad, huh?”

“Yeah.”

••••••••

“Yixing come over here, let me show you something,” they were the only two in the hospital gardens today after the morning showers had saturated everything. There was only a light sprinkle in the air now but it was enough to keep the sick or recovering away. Kris beckons Yixing to follow him, and they walk to a small flight of stairs that lead back into the hospital.

“Watch,” Kris gives his crutch to Yixing. He’s balancing on his good leg with his bad leg bent up, arms outstretched to keep his balance. Slowly he lowers his bad leg onto the first step. His foot is floppy and limp on contact with the hard surface initially, but he carefully redistributes his weight. He wobbles, Yixing quickly reaches out to grab him but Kris pushes his hand away and steadies himself. Yixing notices Kris wince and bite his lip, and the glistening from the small beads of sweat forming on his forehead. He brings his other good leg up behind and lands on both feet, stable.

He’s on both feet!

“That’s amazing Kris!” Yixing is overwhelmed by a sense of pride and admiration, jumping up and down clapping stupidly. This was the first time he’d seen Kris stand without his crutches, plus he just managed to climb a whole step!

But Kris doesn’t look anywhere near as impressed with himself as Yixing does. He glares at Yixing darkly, expression blank, thick eyebrows looking more menacing than ever.

“Don’t mock me, Yixing,” he retorts heavily, clearly out of breath. “Climbing one lousy step and look at me," he wipes his forehead with the back of his hand.

"How am I ever going to play basketball again?” Kris asks, but Yixing knew the question wasn’t directed at him.

“What are you talking about, you couldn’t even stand on your leg when I -,” Yixing’s sentence is cut off. Kris in his stubbornness attempts to lift his bad leg onto the next step, all too quickly. He forces his foot too hard down, his leg completely gives in and he slips on the wet concrete, and falls.  Panicked, he reaches out to grab the nearest thing for support, which was unfortunately Yixing, who falls too, colliding head first right into the stair edge. He feels the skin on his forehead split and everything goes black.

Yixing opens his eyes; he feels something warm (presumably blood) oozing down his face. Everything is blurry initially but he blinks a few times and his eyes start to focus. He sees Kris lying on the muddy floor, motionless.

“Kris!”