Haya woke up with a jolt, her heart thudding in her chest, so wild and loud, she felt like it would burst out at any given moment.
Her head was throbbing with immeasurable pain.

Her surroundings were white, almost like the thick fog she had been dreaming about so often.
She wanted to go back to sleep, for she wanted to avoid the thick fog. It scared her because it had some unrevealed meaning and she did not like things she wasn't certain about.
She did not like being in the dark.

But lately it seemed like the dark was where she lived.
Her surroundings may have been white but it all felt dark.

She could close her eyes or leave them open and she would still feel the same emptiness around her.
She was sure that if she was lying in a grave, things wouldn't be so different.

She still had no clear idea of her surroundings, and she ardently wanted to figure that part out before figuring out why her face and hands felt caged.

Her eyes kept roving the room for clues until they landed on the IV attached to her arm.

It felt like a flood, the memories rushing back all at once, and she winced as if she was actually hit by a flood.

Her head hurt because of the all the sedation. Her face and hands felt caged because of the bandages.
Her heart was thudding because of the terrible nightmares.

Haya had had a mental picture of her crawling out of the dark place, but as she recalled why she was in the hospital, instead of moving forward, she felt like she had just been thrown back in, thousand times deeper.

She looked towards the door at the sound of it opening and found her mother at the entrance.

Instead of coming in and embracing her daughter, her mother ran to the get the doctor.

The doctor entered the room with an expression of tiredness and she inwardly cursed herself for being awake.
The world was better when she was unconscious. It was the only pause button to life.

The doctor examined her like she was another piece of rejected machinery he had to fix at all costs.

"Okay, so let's discuss the surgery."
These were the first words the doctor had spoken in all the five minutes that he had took to examine her

She felt confused.
Right now she was only trying to absorb in the fact that she was actually awake and would have to face all of this, head on.

"Give her a moment, doctor, she just woke up." Her mother said to the doctor who gave Haya a look of empathy and impatience as he walked out, huffing.

She wrapped her arms around her mother, holding on for dear life as her mother cried but tried to convince her daughter that she would be okay.

Haya's own feelings perplexed her, she didn't feel sad, not even the slightest bit.

Instead, she felt angry.
She felt betrayed.
She felt hurt.
She felt ruined.
She felt broken.
Oh, how broken she felt!

She felt as if he hadn't just disheveled her face but he had took a hammer to her soul and crushed it until her soul, just like the rest of her self, was in pieces.

She would try, and she would try her best, and she was somewhat sure she would fix her body but what would she do about her soul?

What could she do about her soul?

It seemed to her as if the feeling inside her would never go away. The sunken feeling in her heart rang alarm bells, signaling to her that it was here to stay.

When she was about to marry him, she thought she had made the right choice, she thought she knew best.
She was wrong of course.

So she had the tiny bit of hope that maybe right now, she was wrong too.
This was probably the first time Haya wished she was wrong.

She saw her dad enter the room and some part of her felt relieved.

Relieved because she knew how emotional her mother was, she knew that as soon as her mother let go of her she would run out of the room crying but her father would give her the answers she wanted, the answers she needed.

Followed by her dad came in Zayan, her childhood best friend.
With her current situation and mindset, if it was even possible, she felt happy.

She knew that if everybody else failed, Zayan would always have her back.

As soon as Haya let go of her mother, she ran out of the room sobbing so hard that Haya felt the urge to detach the IV and run after her mother.

She turned to her father
"Dad...how...why... I don't understand. I can't do this.... I can't..."

When she saw her dad walk in through the wretched hospital doors, she knew what she wanted to ask him.
She had rehearsed it in her mind, all the words were clear and so was the tone she would ask it in, authoritative yet helpless so her dad would have no choice but to tell her the truth.

Yet, for some reason unknown to her, as she tried to voice her well rehearsed sentence, it came out as nothing but a jittery string of unmatched words.

She had told herself over and over again that she would not fumble, that she would prove to her parents that she could fight through this but her voice and her words had betrayed her, and that made her more angry.

"I.. I meant to say...how did this...why...it doesn't make se...doesn't make sense...I.."
Her words betrayed her yet again and she felt like throwing the vase beside her bed at the wall, instead she closed her eyes and huffed.

She tried again and again to say what she wanted to but her throat was choked up and not even a single word came out of her mouth.

"He threw acid" Zayan's voice cut through the tangible aura of helplessness in the room and her eyes snapped to his face which was lowered to the ground.

She knew that, of course she did. She felt it.
With the bandages and the constant nightmares, it was all pretty clear.

Even if she was ever diagnosed with amnesia, she doubted she would ever forget that disturbing night, much less forget the things she felt

The fight. The slaps. The fire. The betrayal. The divorce. The feeling of being hurt. The burn. The never ending burn.

Those moments and those feelings had been carved in her bones and it was impossible to forget anything about that night.

But then, what was she even trying to ask if she knew what had happened?

She asked herself that question and so, with each passing minute, she felt more and more unsure of her thoughts, her sanity and the things she was feeling.

It was at this moment that the strongest man in her life, her father, walked out of the room with tears glistening in his eyes and she realized that Mohsin had wrecked more than just her face.

He had wrecked all that she held close to her heart