The rules changed after the doctor.
They arrived suddenly, without explanation, layered over one another in ways that made no sense to Ari. Some were strict. Some were vague. All of them shifted depending on the day.
"Don't raise your voice."
"Sit still."
"Why are you rocking?"
"Stop that right now."
Ari tried to comply. He really did.
But trying required calm, and calm was increasingly rare. The first punishment came when he spilled his drink at dinner.
It was an accident. His hands had been shaking. The glass tipped, liquid spreading across the table in a slow, inevitable wave.
His father stood abruptly.
"What did we say?" he demanded.
Ari froze, heart racing. He searched his memory for the correct rule, the one that applied here.
"I—I'm sorry," he said.
"That's not enough," his father snapped.
His mother didn't intervene this time. She looked away, jaw tight.
The punishment was swift. Sharp. Pain flared across Ari's arm, hot and immediate, stealing the breath from his lungs. He gasped, eyes wide, tears spilling over before he could stop them.
"Go to your room," his father said.
Ari stumbled away, shaking.
In his room, he collapsed onto the floor, curling into himself, rocking hard now, desperate for relief. The pain lingered, radiating outward, drowning the noise inside him for a brief, fragile moment.
He noticed it then. The pain quieted things. Not completely. Not permanently.
But enough.
Over time, the pattern repeated.
Outbursts led to punishment. Punishment brought pain. Pain brought silence.
The rules never stabilized. One day, he was punished for speaking out of turn. Another day, for not speaking at all. Sometimes his mother cried afterward, apologizing quietly. Sometimes his father looked ashamed.
Sometimes neither of them spoke.
Ari learned quickly that consistency was not the goal.
Control was.
The pain did not teach him what to do. It taught him what worked.
When the noise grew unbearable, when his thoughts blurred into something sharp and dangerous, he began to crave the impact—not consciously, not deliberately, but instinctively. His body recognized it as a release valve.
Pain cut through chaos.
It grounded him.
He did not tell anyone this. He didn't have the language for it, and even if he did, he sensed it would not be welcome.
At school, the pressure continued to build. At home, the punishments continued to land.
Ari began to associate relief with harm—not as a desire, but as a mechanism. Something that happened to him, something that ended the overload when nothing else could.
One night, after a particularly loud argument between his parents, Ari pressed his forehead against the wall, breathing hard, wishing for the silence that followed punishment.
The thought startled him. He pulled back, horrified, then helpless. The noise inside him surged again.
Ari hugged himself tightly, rocking in the dark, understanding something with sickening clarity:
Pain was the only thing that made the world quiet. And the world, he was learning, did not care how that quiet was achieved.