How nice would it be if
Empathy
Was as easy as cross check done move on?
As simple as sewing several stitches
Slapping on a “come back in a few weeks”
Put some ice on it and pop a few pills?

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges.
Trauma bleeds.
Out of wounds and across boundaries.
Sadness becomes a seizure.

When someone carves their soul open
Letting its contents spill out
The blood and guts in all their glory
How can the bandaid of that must really be hard
Stop the stream of sorrow?
How do we expect to be a tourist in the suffering of others
While reducing them to a bundle of symptoms?

Empathy is not a meteor shower of synapses
Firing across the brain
It is a choice we make to extend ourselves.

If you want to show empathy
Get your bags packed and your passport ready
You enter another person’s pain
As you’d enter another country.
You crawl into that box
Even if it’s a tight fit
And you sit.
And you listen.
And you let yourself be pierced by pain and bittersweetness
And you look for the horizon beyond the visible.
You don’t steal an experience, but you share the slice of story.
You learn that even if you mark checklist item thirty-one
It will never be over, never really cross check done.