EMPATHY

Why do you keep doing that? You’re like a funhouse ride at the fair, taking me past scenes of pain and despair and expecting me to care. What do I see? People who’ve booted their chance for the big dance. All it means is more for me. I’m your black hole. You don’t get empathy without me. I’m the negative charge. You need a positive and a negative charge to keep spinning. Am I miserable? I think it’s you carrying a bloated backpack of guilt down the street, stopping at every dog, child, beggar, homeless, and hopeless case. Knock yourself out in good works. Remember Donald Duck’s rich uncle, Scrooge McDuck, sitting on his pile of money? That’ll be me. I don’t go in for psycho cruelty, look for my lost cousins who partake, enough to fill your screens and make you scream. Mine is passive, my harm trails behind, a dust cloud’s churn of not giving a fuck.

You know it. You’ve seen it on the playground, in your family (if not, worse luck), how the rest of us form a glue, a magnetic force that saves life from showing its teeth and being savage, brutish, and short. We hold the line because we knew a nourishing breast, a warm breakfast, a tuck into bed, an arm around the shoulder, hot broth when sick, were shamed for hurting the dog (sorry, sorry, just an experiment, testing reflexes), taught, encouraged, loved, and wanted more. Yes, sex is a whirligig; it rattles us like a dog with a toy, and it crashes into dead ends without some non-stick glue. I’m not stuck to you; I want an I-see-you-you-see-me jamboree. How does that happen? Outside myself, I see something as precious as me. It’s not the thought that counts; it’s what we do: the hand up, the open hand, a safe place, sacrifice, care, risk, patience, and more. The work that feeling does when it’s not all about an only-you boogaloo.

Do we stop and help the unlucky person who fell through the ice on the picturesque pond because of practicality, society depends on it, or morality, value of life, or shame if we didn’t, or we want the same for us if found thrashing in freezing water, screaming for help and afraid? Beyond civics and ethical ABCs, a self to be whole threads a dynamic connection to others. Empathy is a seamstress. We dress ourselves in qualities that attract; the species has to keep score, but our lives are bigger and brighter when we know another in joy, in pain, and in loss, and they us. So, Socrates, do you claim ‘bigger’ and ‘brighter’ as existential states? Yes indeedy I do, the opposite of small and dark. To live in a bigger world to embrace all creatures (insects are a hard lift). To have love is to be dressed in empathy; its light floods us with an intensity that burns, inspires, despairs, and sustains.

Oh yes, I can stir up a pot of hate on your sad ass as good as the next. Is it a contradiction or a state of nature that I love my fellow humans and find it easy to dump them in the bucket of snot, not worth the time of day? Like Harry at work. He smells, and he’s always talking with food in his mouth. He laughs so loud at his own jokes that he doesn’t realize no one’s laughing. He rattles away on the phone in some language I’ve never heard. I know he’s talking shit about me and the other guys. I hear he doesn’t believe like us. I saw him on the street holding hands with a guy, and chattering, I couldn’t understand, foreign talk. Why is he even here, taking up space? I know a guy, you know, a regular guy, no crap, who needs that job. Fuck him. He talks all bigshot about the rule of law, corruption, fascist blah, blah. It makes me want to kick him in the teeth.

I saw Harry sitting alone at lunch. I asked if I could join him. He made a dumb joke about the chair not being worthy of my ass. I told Harry my ass is too humble for such talk, since my mirror gives it no such praise. I asked him what he was eating since the food on his plate intrigued me. Surprisingly, his face became red with embarrassment over his homemade lunch. He paused, judging if I was ready to sneer. He said it’s called Roti-Sabzi. I can see this is flatbread, and that smells like a curry. Brash Harry, suddenly shy, asked if I’d like a taste? I beamed, and he blinked to control his feelings. He took some flatbread then scooped, saying, “Vegetable curry, potatoes, and peppers.” He looked nervous, as if meeting his mother-in-law for the first time. It was delicious. I asked where I could travel to find others eating such a lunch. Harry glanced around, unsure, then met my eyes. He fiddled with his napkin and placed the word Mumbai before me like a test to see if I thought it threatened like a snake. “Exciting, that must be a lot to leave behind. Do they call you Harry in Mumbai?” He snorted, then mumbled a name he didn’t yet trust me to know. Tell me, Harry from Mumbai, the things you miss there. He stared into the distance, then slowly expanded like a flower popping open in the sun.