A piece from my journal after witnessing my Dad's death and losing my partner of a decade to a brain injury:
Cursed empathy. Cursed curiosity. Cursed compassion. I spend my time searching for familiarity in the faces of strange men. Someone to hold me while I sort through the morbitity of the things I've seen. Someone to help me carry all that I know about reality now. Everything I know about the world, mortality, and how fragile human life is. Something, someone that doesn't exist. What a miserable place. I no longer see the things that used to be so clear and apparent to me. The things that used to sparkle and glow with love and joy. Holidays, first kisses, the thought of potential and commiting yourself to someone. I wish I could stop feeling. Feeling his pain, theirs, hers. The pain of strangers. Pain I have no business knowing. Pain that isn't mine to feel. Ignorance is bliss and I am cursed with curiosity. Cursed with a thirst for the unknown.
"Too sensitive, a little too serious. Lighten up."
I want to. Desperately I do. I know too much. I feel too much. My feelings trigger thoughts and vice versa. It just keeps going around and around in circles like some kind of sick merry go round. Sometimes the feelings will let me rest, but the thoughts linger. They sit and hide in corners waiting to creep up on me when I least expect it. On good days they're scattered across my floor and I can light heartidly dance around them on my tippy toes. On bad days they leave me paralyzed, unable to move, unable to call for help.
These cursed parts of me want to watch me stretch myself so thin that I'll rip right open. They want to watch me agonize over the ethics and morals of the most insignificant things until I retreat into bed and stay there until I can breathe again.
My friends are just babysitters now. An insurance plan that the survivalist in me created on a good day. Because the cursed parts of me aren't after my friends or family or the things I love. They only want to destroy me.
