I stroll aimlessly along the crowded sidewalk

Teeming

With people of all races, heights, weights, stories

I can’t help but wonder

What events are unfolding

Inside the crevices and confines of each individual cranium

 

I place myself within their consciousness

Alive

Suddenly I am the gentleman sitting alone at a café

Staring down at a black coffee

As dark as my wife’s eyes

Reflecting the image of the pale green umbrella above the table

And the brilliant sunshine in her smile

 

Empathy

There’s not one day that I don’t feel it

I see an elderly man by himself

His thoughts being propelled into a bitter drink

As he reflects on the day he brought his wife to this very café

And the coffee that she would brew him each morning

Before she left for the hospital

And lingered, like a stain, in his mind

 

He thinks about how he never remembers to plug the machine in now

Or how his hands shake when he scoops up the grinds

Because each tiny granule

Reminds him of all the ways he could make her laugh

All the times she’d fixed his tie before a meeting

All the times she’d look at him with those dark dark eyes

Never half as bitter as the cold coffee in his trembling hands

 

Others might see this man as a homebody

A stay in the house, get off my lawn, I don’t want what you’re selling

But I give him the benefit of the doubt

Empathy

A curse and a blessing

 

When the waitress walks up to check on him

And he replies with a snide comment about “restaurant service these days”

It might be because she’d just interrupted

A memory

Of the day he’d piggybacked his wife home in the rain

Because she was wearing her suede church shoes

And he was young enough to carry her

 

When a baby in the café begins to cry for its mother

And the man turns around to deliver a piercing stare

Perhaps it’s not one of contempt

But a reminder

To the nights he’d spent

Rocking his own child asleep while it cried for its mother

Much like it did at the funeral six Sundays ago

Now old enough to have children of its own

 

Empathetic

Not nosy, prying, intrusive

But able to feel what others feel

Experience what others experience

Replicate someone else’s emotion and make it yours

Is it selfish?

It’s human.

Or rather, something humans would benefit from

If only they could see life

Through the galaxies and supernovas of another’s eyes

The explosion of sparkling thoughts and memories in some peoples’ minds

I can’t fathom what it would be like

To exist by yourself

Locked within the 73 cubic inches of your own skull

 

That’s why I try to distinguish life through others

Not that I don’t care for my own

But I feel that you learn infinitely more

By observing the world around you

Like a person who’s had their heart broken twelve times

As opposed to twice

Or like a person who can get out of bed in the morning

To go to the same café

Where he proposed to his wife 50 years ago

 

I want to be individual

But I benefit from others’ perspectives

The word “flawless” is specific

But I prefer to think of myself

As inhibiting the flaws of those I’ve empathized with

The mistakes, worries, setbacks, concerns

I’ve taken them all and turned their bitterness

Into the caffeine that keeps me running

The steam in my veins and the ripples in my heart

Let me know I’m warm and alive

And have hopefully left a stain in your mind