Impersonal Sympathy

You know those moments where you want desperately not to lend yourself to feeling an emotion around someone?

You don’t want to share so quickly all the intimacies that harbor around you—up, down, and around you, like a cupcake wrapper.

You’re surrounded by your own awareness.

Tonight there was a man who told me about Mexico, and I listened to the words, but locked out all the things that were hard to hear.

I will not sit long with that statement, sir. You don’t need to know right this second how largely I can feel.

So I will tell you the correct and automatic answer: That’s so terrible.

But the words left me as if they weren’t my own. As if my ear and mouth were having a conversation with you that my aliveness was separate from.

I was thinking of volleyball.

Because YOU weren’t telling me these awful things the right way.

You, sir, were telling it flat.

How was I to respond to that?

Cry in front of you?

You who saw in person what I am merely hearing?

But there are associations in my mind,

Every one of them is sneering.

Telling me to feel it,

Telling only me,

Like a little man is standing on my earring.

 

I had to tell you that.
That I am prone to feeling.