Sympathy was my defense mechanism.
Isn’t it innate to be empathetic?
To sense what is unrecognizable or familiar and accept both as an existence.
To extend love and comfort if there is enough to give?
Isn’t empathy natural?
But that time I reached to comfort you and you pushed me away,
that time I waved and you looked off,
Maybe I’m unrecognizable to you,
Maybe I’m too similar to you.
You ran off.
My brother, my friend.
My sister, you pretend
That you don’t need empathy, you don’t need strength from outside of yourself.
And that you’re better off in the familiar.
And you walked away from me.
And you looked down when I passed,
And you looked up, nose up.
So when I know you and remember you and sense you,
After times of being left alone, the natural tendency is toward sympathy.
You chose to dwell in a place of sorrow and aloneness and facade.
Darling you look stunning from the outside.
Unfamiliar.
But on the inside what I sense...
I feel sympathy.
Not empathy.
Because you won’t let me.
Because I don’t want to relate.
To the thing that pushes me away.
To that thing that keeps you walking by foot and not with mind.
That you take you fragile seat in circles filled with empty greetings and hidden daggers when you imagine your world with people who matter.
Shaking hands and signing waivers and agreements and laying your name on lines and invites that are attached to your dream you caught from something or someone from that pill you took or that drink you drank or that sweet you ate or the spliff you smoked.
It’s from someone else.
So unfamiliar.
That the thing you took,
You chose to let envelop you and set outside the thing that taught you, loved you and made you.
And you made that thing you took, become, in you.
And so, it’s you?
And I don’t feel you anymore.
When you are so near and so far,
How can you sense the reality and the gravity of your choices.
Something looking past me sees through you.
Your own senses, your own lenses.
Reflected so intimately that it’s blinding.
N a r c I s...
Please forgive me.
See?
How being sympathetic is probably the better natural reaction than frustration?
My love, I miss you, from the life we shared before.
That time when you were my friend,
And when we’d see each other,
You remembered me.
Because in your heart the thing that sparked you was the same that sparked me and so we knew that we were both humans and saints and doves and the olive branch.
Sympathy is my defense mechanism.
Isn’t it innate to be empathetic?
To sense what is unrecognizable or familiar and accept both as an existence.
To extend love and comfort if there is enough to give?
Isn’t empathy natural?