#compassionfatigue
Ah—breathe long, then low.
To see life through all these eyes
is to walk with a handful of souls;
every gaze lends you its weather,
every borrowed sorrow fastens itself
like a nail in your cross
no resurrection promised,
just then another stake, wooden splinters,
impaled, consenting, enduring,
until the heart grows unbearably heavy
with knowledge it never asked to hold.
And to see life not through your own,
through a lens of unfathomable despair
joy, love, sorrow
none of it mine,
none of it allowed to stay
to blink from behind another’s mouth,
another’s fear, another’s borrowed certainty,
to shed a tear for that which is not your own
ah, that leaves the heart drenched, worn thin,
drowning in itself,
more saturated and closer to rupture.
A riverbed memorizing water from other streams,
a cup polished smooth
by lips that were never yours.
I am clean only where I am empty.
I have learned this:
memory is a fire that both warms and consumes.
Sometimes wisdom is letting it go
letting names slip into the abyss,
letting scenes soften into shades,
letting the past lie down
like a tired animal
and sleep.
And yet—fire in the darkness
what else do we have?
Memory is our last possession;
no one can steal it without your consent.
It is the only proof
we once stood somewhere
and mattered.
Shadows in the stained-glass window
yes, I often reflect.
The stains, the flaws,
they know my face better than mirrors.
I watch myself layered with night,
with rooms I have already left,
with people who live now only
as pressure behind the eyes.
Tear drops and rain drops
are they not the same?
Both fall without apology.
Both arrive from an overcrowded sky.
Both leave the ground darker,
richer,
more honest
and sometimes, yes,
you get to play in the puddles.
Sometimes I cannot tell
if the wetness on my cheeks
comes from grief
or from weather passing through me.
Perhaps the body is only a window,
and sometimes I open it
knowing the storm will ruin me,
and the storm
was never truly ours.
So I stand here, carrying empathy,
between too many eyes
and my own failing vision,
between forgetting and remembering,
between wisdom and hunger,
holding what remains:
a heart still beating
heavy and dry at once
learning, slowly,
how to see without drowning,
how to remember
without burning the house down.
Ah, life
teach me which eyes to close,
and which one
is finally mine.
Jan 21
Jan 21, 2026 at 2:45 AM UTC
There is so much misery in the world that we are becoming quite hardened and callous to that constant plucking of our hearts.
Aug 19, 2015
Aug 19, 2015 at 8:57 PM UTC