On Empathy

She had always been hyper-sensitive to it: the crushing imminence of suffering all around her. She had always noticed it: the slope of a stranger's lips in the downwards arc of sadness or the lonely man on the bus home from work reading yesterday's paper like there was no point in news because it wouldn't be good. At least if it had already happened twenty-four hours ago, there was nothing he could do about it. She noticed the people in Walmart with grey hairs underlining their Nice'n'Easy box dyes, shopping carts pushed slowly across the cracked linoleum floors under the manufactured brightness of the overhead fluorescents, a stark contrast to the eleven p.m. darkness outside. She had always noticed the sadness of the world, and she had always created the worst fiction out of possible stories: she had always imagined the people driving at three a.m. were either leaving their families or had no family to go to at all. She hated the failure of human trial: the girl next to her at the hostel kitchen who looked barely sixteen and hadn't been taught how to cook noodles, and whose fried egg stuck to the pan and crumbled into pieces as she tried to scrape it from the metal. She felt the heaving sigh of the earth in the pointless labour of existence, the threadbare families on the Parisian streets, scrounging for change with hole-ridden gloves as the carefully plasticized businessmen strode carelessly by. She had always noticed the unfairness of it. And still, she was not depressed, not so profoundly sad as one might expect of a person with this seemingly pessimistic nature. Her internal happiness was a contrast to the profound sadness of those around her, and so when she felt their suffering as she watched them struggle, she felt the reverberations of  secondhand melancholy like cigarette smoke wrack her insides, shake her bones down to the core. And in these moments, she was overcome by a crushing emptiness, like a vacuum had sucked the joy from her lips. But the extremity of these feelings: they were the reason she knew she wasn't like them. The reason she knew she wasn't sad, not deep down, not irrevocably, not internally. Because their darkness slipped into her as wind flows down the pressure gradient, high concentration to low concentration, their particles seeping into hers. And although it hurt her, although she wished sometimes to be sterile from it, to be sheltered from their pain, she was okay with it. Really. Because she knew that pain shared is pain less concentrated and she hoped her happiness would seep into them by osmosis the way theirs had into her.

Racing Morning

She sprinted towards the hills rising swollen and pregnant with thistle and overripe blackberries, her determination creasing the space between her eyes. The sun was not yet risen but she couldn't quite tell, the clouds swaddled the sky in grey-soaked cotton and hid any brightness from view. Beneath her, the New Town's lights were still blinking through the early morning darkness and she felt caught in the limbo between night and not quite waking. She was racing the sun; she wanted to see it rise above the extinct volcano as if it were acknowledging her presence, as if the brightness would blind her like the fireworks over Montmartre and it would all make sense. She wanted immediacy, she wanted the suddenness of beauty to stun her out of the cotton wool fog of greyness that she had been wading through for years. She wanted the sun to be brighter than gold, and she panicked as she thought she saw the darkness lightening. She was at the foot of the hill now, the winding path snaking like an unkept promise to the rugged tower of broken lava rock. She walked faster now, her lungs accepting the cold air, in and out, in and out. She remembered the last time she had been someplace like this, the last time she had seen never ending fields strewn with tall, dying grass and the way the clouds enveloped the landscape. She remembered that place, months ago, a different season, the height of summer. She had been with them, and they had laughed and ran and rolled through the dead grass and rocky paths. She was alone now, a singularity in a world of pairs. She walked slower as the realization settled upon her like gravel dust. She could handle being alone, liked the way she wrote her future like she could decide which adjectives would loop together to form her life. She liked the way the air felt around her, clean and open wide like possibility. But she hated the moments like this, the ones bursting with nostalgia, the inches between the seconds when she needed somebody, someone next to her to fill that open space, someone to save her from simply talking to the wind as it ran long fingers through her hair. So she climbed faster towards the crest of the rubble, to the spot where the clouds seemed to be breaking like hardened magma to reveal the brightening sky. She had missed it, she thought, the sun already risen and her hopes for sudden beauty dashed. She breathed heavier against the sharp incline, losing her footing on the rain-soaked grass and slamming her right leg against wet rocks. She looked upwards toward the taunting cliffs and her cheeks flushed rose.

           And then she turned around, catching the breath escaping from her tired lungs faster than the sun was climbing in the sky. She saw the sea, stretched out like surrender to the way the clouds were still heavy like a blanket. She saw the islands, far off and broken up like jigsaw pieces scattered by the wind. She saw the city, geometrically architectured and punctuated by the castle crumbling to the left and the pillars of the national monument dwarfed my her position on the hill. She noticed everything quickly, all at once, then little by little, gradually, her eyes registering every detail of pleated landscape and gold-shedding autumn tree. She noticed the swans, crisp white by the shimmering loch, the way the crows (or were they ravens?) arced and swooped against the sky. She noticed the varying shades of green and yellow in the grass. And she realized that's the way it was with beautiful things. She realized the sky had been lightening like a watercolourist adding water to his paints, the fabric of the sky slowly being washed out from the indigo of dawn to the azure of morning. She realized it was a process, this beauty. It didn't happen with suddenness, with a breathtaking moment of realization.  It took hours for the night to bleed into morning and she realized darkness had so many layers to shed before light. And she saw the sun, peeking out from a rip in the clouds. And she wasn't at the top yet, but it didn't matter. She was breathing and the sun was rising and the landscape stretched around her and she had made it. Not to the top, but here. She had made it here and she was alive and it was okay. She was okay.

        She climbed to the top and the wind whipped her face and sucked tears from her eyes and she climbed down somehow more whole than he had been before. She was no longer a shell of failures and fading scars and rising loneliness. She was no longer a strip of tattered fabric racing the sun for a place in the sky. And she was no longer empty. She skipped at one point, running down the steep slope, her black sneakers hopping over rocks as the smallest thread of laughter escaped her lips.

highs and lows

I am all at once breathless from the sheer beauty of everything around me
And fighting for breath in the chaotic whirlwind that has been the past two months
It's all little things
It could be worse
Alone, these things are manageable
Trivial, almost
But piled up on top of each other and on top of me
They seem insurmountable
Inconceivable
Giving up seems reasonable sometimes
When little failures add up and I feel like everything is too hard
But all the little moments of breathless beauty
All the little moments of satisfied happiness
Of I did it
They make the lows worth it
Because at the end of the day I am alive and I am writing this and I am happy
Deep down, in those internal caverns where it really matters
I am happy

Daylight

We climbed the stairs like pilgrims to my temple and my tears were still inked in salt
They infiltrated my cavern with light held in the pockets of the bubbles in the sparkling wine they poured
Into glasses with the fizz of comfortable things like the way she sprawled on my mattress
Comfortable things like barriers down music up sufjan dancing in melodic circles around the kitchen light our warmth
Fogging the glass window
Looking out over the rooftops of our Paris
Behind which the moon was almost full
Almost
Like I was almost happy
Almost perfect
They way Paris is almost perfect
But they were here and they were laughing and oldies warmed the stone floor of my studio like hot coffee and we spoke and we laughed and we cried and we held on to each other like we are holding on to Paris
And the stars shone barely visible the way the Eiffel Tower hides beneath fog like it's bashful
And I saw the way her eyes flicker the same as mine when we speak of love and being fourteen
And they left three bottles of cheap wine on the floor and everything feels warmer
It's like how everything feels easier in daylight
They are my daylight
The way the moon brightens the lives of stars

Stars

I live in an attic under a slate grey roof that skims the sky of Paris with its fingertips
And the hallway leading to my front door is peeling and the pipes snake like
Creatures out of the damp-smelling walls
And my sink is plugged and my fridge is sparsely furnished with three eggs, tomato-basil pesto, butter, avocados, oranges, lentils, and milk
And my apartment is cold in the morning when the sun wakes me with its stabbing brightness
And the construction workers down the street pound away at the resistant pavement with power drills and sledgehammers
And my stone floor is unforgiving to bare feet out of my shower in the middle of my kitchen
Yes, my apartment is fourteen square meters and I brush my teeth in the kitchen sink
And for some reason the savings I gathered last year living in my parents' house have all dissipated into the expensive Parisian night and I am getting by but just barely
And yes it's scary and lonely sometimes and full of bursting disappointment and sometimes I feel failure like I have yet to accomplish anything at all
But sometimes I look out my window at the densely packed rooftops poking the sky with their attic windows and I gaze at the orange glow of the streetlights and
I have achieved this
It's not perfect, nor is anything worth having, because nothing real is perfect and what good is an empty, perfected fantasy?
All this is real and flawed and scary and exhilarating
I am here and I am breathing and maybe my cold little attic is just a pocket in the Parisian sky
Maybe the lifeblood of the stars I see when I'm falling asleep that seem close enough to touch is dripping in through my cracked window and infiltrating my ears with the kind of stuff that births creation
Maybe I'm close enough to hear the clouds rub together in a symphony of almost-rain that swells the pregnant sky with threats of a deluge
Maybe I'm becoming less scared of downpours
Because all this is temporary and soon my attic will be a memory and all these nights will be strung together like bottle corks and all the faces and midnight bottles of wine and laughter reflected in the shimmering canals will all feel like dreams in an attic almost touching the stars and the moon and we will all feel like a perfected fantasy
All this is beautiful and I'm trying to hold as much beautiful as I can between my trembling fingertips as I beg to touch the stars
And we talk of possibility like we are dancing on slate grey rooftops to the sound of the clouds
And for a moment we are the rulers of this city up here in our attic kingdoms
For a moment we are more than overdrafts and feeling scared and feeling empty
For a moment we are full of sky

Concrete

And you're upstairs in your glass castle looking down on us like we're specs of dust on your chrome appliances

Your chandelier hangs oversized and overrated from your vaulted ceilings void of warmth

Diamonds glisten against the black of bone-chilling emptiness

You pour your wine and you look down on them

Neatly packed dominoes, a row of sleeping bags like chrysalises 

Bled together like a friendship bracelet, woven for warmth

You can't smell the acidity of ammonia dripping down the drain beneath your feet

The drunken snores of sleeping men awaiting death like a sentence

It's cold down here

It's cold down here where concrete is a mattress and the city is unforgiving

Cold walls threatening, angry like the winds that chill us without fake fireplaces roaring with forced heat

An illusion like the security of your gold plated kingdom

Because stripped down naked to the bones of your existence you are no better than them

You are a breathing producing consuming machine

Just trying to imprint your footprint deeper into the earth's surface

The only difference is they aren't scared to face the reality of concrete,

The lifelessness of architecture

The flatline of a manufactured city's still heartbeat when the power is cut

Persistence

I'm constantly thrown back to myself twelve years old fallen to my knees in the snow
Because the amount of As on that piece of paper didn't correspond to what I thought I was worth
It's every time guilt cripples me into a shell of skin that only wants to erase itself
It's every time I doubt the air I breathe and it's all too big for me
It's swollen eyes and breathless cries because failure clips wings and flight is futile
Because failure is deemed irregularly, indescribably, incoherently
It's the need to dissolve because dissolution is the only antidote to the inability to be great
A life stretched between extremities
It's craving arms to hold me up like a skeleton
And hating my skin for sticking to another's in the morning
It's the persistence of heated arguments inside my brain that births the persistence that drives me
It's evil but necessary
And sometimes the night is too dark and the rain is heavy
On lungs that crave recovery
Sometimes expectations drown out reality
And I'm twelve years old with a piece of paper on my knees
I'm a child building sandcastles beneath the waves