He has always been an eccentric character.
Even as a young child, Mack understood that his strangeness had more to do with the voices that he hears inside his head than his own weird ethnicity and accent.
A little bit out of place as compared to the people that filled up his messy world, he had trouble fitting in. He is not so much as not self-aware of himself as he thought he originally was when in fact he is far more aware of himself than the average.
He finds himself always obsessing over things that a normal person would find to be insignificant – like the sound of the clock ticking, the wind howling, the whistle of the kettle, and the color blue.
That was another obsession of his.
The color of the sky.
The color of the rain.
The color of the sadness.
Perhaps it is this quiet obsession of this particular color that even the very clothes he wear would bear the color of the ocean, of calm and serenity. It is also the color of the brewing storm, of thunder and lighting.
He rarely wears anything that is far from how he feels – and thoughts and emotions for him are always a shade darker than the ones he puts on – even darker than the midnight sky that is his hair, his vain attempt to hide its natural blond color.
It is also precisely because of that that he always keeps a fedora with him. It helps protect himself from the rain that threatens to fall – whether it be from the tears of heaven or from the darkness of his mind. Despite his demons being mental, having something to physically hold on to makes him feel capable. And the leather that covers his feet up to his calf mid-calf makes him believe that he is still able to stand on his own two feet, even when the ground him trembles despite being unmoving.
Foolish as it may seem, a sense of control in a completely uncontrollable world like his is enough to dispel him from his nightmare, or at least, long enough for him to get his bearings back.
It is when his fedoras don't work that he often finds himself lost in oblivion – and no sense of balance or control can fully stop the gnawing in the pit of his stomach, or from the black spots that threaten to overcome his chocolate-colored eyes. That doesn't mean he doesn't try though.
To prevent his mind from collapsing in on him, he will try to shift his attention.
He will try to imagine how he looks behind his closed lids, his inner eyes darting from his thick eyebrows to the freckles that scatter across his cheeks to the light stubble that rests on his chin, together with that tiny black dot he always hated, to the very box-shaped head he had inherited from his father.
He will try to detach himself from his thoughts and take deep breaths – inhale, exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
Again and again until he can calm the erratic beatings of his heart.
And when this fails, he finds himself falling.
First, it was in a matter of how he repetitively washed his hands clean until the soap reddens his skin, his hands brushing and rubbing and desperate up to his elbows, even causing a deeper shade of red to the map-shaped welt that rested on his left wrist (one that never quite fully healed after an unfortunate accident one Monday-morning when he was but a wee eight-year-old).
Soon it escalated to scratching.
Scratch.
Scratch.
