Am I blessed,
or am I simply cursed in a language
no one else can hear?
I walk through crowded rooms
and my chest is never my own.
Every fear that isn’t spoken
finds a way beneath my skin.
Every tear that isn’t cried
settles somewhere behind my ribs.
I hear the silence when panic calls.
I feel the scream
long before it reaches someone’s throat.
And somehow,
I always catch it.
They call it empathy.
A gift.
A beautiful thing -
to understand without being told,
to hold a stranger’s phantom hand,
to read the storm hiding behind someone’s smile.
But they don’t see what happens
after everyone goes home.
They don’t see me lying awake at 3:00 a.m.,
trying to separate my heartbeat from theirs.
Whose anxiety is this?
Whose grief?
Whose heartbreak is tightening around my throat
like a hand that has finally remembered
it was supposed to kill me?
Because their pain doesn’t leave.
It follows me.
It crawls under my skin,
settles into the empty spaces I abandoned,
and begins to unpack.
One by one,
they move in.
The lonely.
The grieving.
The terrified.
I have become a home
for ghosts that aren’t mine.
A sponge for the doomed.
I absorb their tragedies
until their memories begin to feel familiar,
until their wounds start bleeding through my dreams,
until I wake up exhausted
from mourning people
who are still alive.
And somewhere along the way,
I forgot the shape of my own heart.
Maybe that is the part they never understand.
I didn’t become this way because I was gifted.
I became this way because I was starving.
I became a master at reading the silence in someone’s eyes
because no one ever bothered
to translate mine.
I learned to recognize abandonment
because I had memorized its footsteps.
I learned to hold trembling hands
because mine had once reached into the dark
and found nothing.
So I began giving away
the comfort I was never given.
I became the rescue
that never arrived for me.
And for a while,
I thought it meant something.
I thought if I carried enough of their pain,
someone might finally notice
how much weight I was already carrying.
If I understood their darkness,
perhaps someone would understand mine.
If I bled for them,
perhaps one day -
someone would bleed for me.
But that is the cruelty of the curse.
It doesn’t fill the hollow.
It feeds it.
The more of them I carry,
the less of myself remains.
Every phantom tear I catch
leaves another mark on my hands.
Every silent scream I hold
settles deeper into my bones.
Every person I save
takes another small piece of me with them
when they leave.
And they always leave.
So now, when I look in the mirror,
I wait.
I wait for the face staring back
to look familiar.
But sometimes,
for just a second,
I don’t recognize him.
His eyes look tired
in ways I don’t remember earning.
His hands look burned
by things I never touched.
His mouth is shaped
around griefs I never lived.
And behind him -
I think I see them.
Everyone.
Standing quietly in the dark.
All the people whose pain I carried.
All the ghosts I let inside.
They are looking at me
with my own eyes.
And suddenly I understand.
I was never haunted by them.
I was haunted by the emptiness
I kept trying to fill with them.
All this time,
I thought I was drowning
because I carried the weight of everyone else’s storms.
But maybe the truth is worse.
Maybe I kept walking into the ocean
because I wanted someone
to notice I couldn’t swim.
Maybe every person I tried to save
was just another desperate attempt
to prove that I was worth saving too.
And now -
there is no room left.
Not for peace.
Not for sleep.
Not even for me.
Only echoes.
Only strangers wearing my memories.
Only a vessel,
filled to the brim
with everyone else’s ghosts.
Sometimes, late at night,
when the world is finally quiet,
I can hear them breathing inside me.
And beneath all of them -
buried somewhere deep enough
that even I can barely hear it -
there is another voice.
Small.
Terrified.
Begging to be understood.
Begging for someone
to finally read its silence.
Begging for someone
to look at me -
and feel me
the way I have been forced
to feel the world.
But no one does.
So the voice grows quieter.
And quieter.
Until one night,
I realize
I can no longer tell
whether I am listening
to myself -
or to the last ghost
wearing my skin.