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.