Empath.

I've lived the kind of life you wouldn't wish for. But if you were me. You wouldn't have lived it that way.

Underground. Dead. Wishing for a saviour but not wanting to be saved.

Had you been in my place, perhaps you would have done things differently—better, probably.

You would have been more. Made more of it all. Gotten over it.

Except you probably wouldn't have been born an empath. Maybe an introvert. Like me.

But an empath. That makes things rather more complicated. And wholly more dangerous.

The first time it happened, I was 7 or so. Or rather, the first time I could give any kind of explanation for it.

I was sitting silently next to my irritated mother; she hadn't said anything in particular, but I could feel it.

The antiseptic waiting room of 'Casualty', my index finger throbbing from having bent it backward into my knuckles in a failed gymnastic escapade. I'd never been in a hospital before. Its brashness surprised me. I suppose what I had envisaged was more akin to a morgue. But this? This was more like a train station. Except louder and the tragedy more palpable than its counterpart.

Children, blotchy and red-eyed, stammering and screeching as desperate mothers tried to mitigate the damage. Hands bound with old cloths, men hobbling aimlessly on crutches. Doctors moved frantically, their quick steps and urgent faces added to the chaos as the scurried in and out of the overbearingly white double doors. I don't know if it was their gaudy brightness or their volume, but they seemed ominous. They swung back and forth too slowly for the strength with which they were pushed, giving a glimpse into the stark corridor of pain behind. I wondered what it would be like when we got there. The receptionist, brash and laden with the burden of managing the sick and the dying, was hardened to it, spitting out names the way a drunk man spits out phlegm on the pavement. With malice and intention for the most part.

In amongst all of it, this lament of suffering, she was there, hunched in her wheelchair. A statue of grace despite her posture. Our eyes met for a moment.

And I knew her.

The noise softened, like the murmur from a conch shell held up to an inquisitive ear, nothing discernible but for the sound of the past of the sea and the limpets climbing onto rocks. I could hear their hearts trembling. In place of the vigour of torment, the palpable, pulsating chaos of pain dissipated and in its place, an eerie calm.

A piercing crack broke the air. The sterile linoleum beneath my feet began to shiver and quake; lacerations and open wounds, black and charred, burst out from every direction, gushing water cascaded violently from the ceiling. My eyes began to swell. Drowning. Then in a gigantic earth-shattering, animalistic roar, a sheer cliff face emerged from the abyss.

Silence.

I stood precariously on its edge, Staring down at the ocean beneath. Wave upon angry wave, spitting and hissing, thrashing against the unforgiving rocks below. Fierce and relentless, I was wet and cold, and my hair fell in long chestnut strands, sticking to my eyes. But somehow, in amongst it all, you were there. I could feel you.

When I came to, we were in her cottage, the one she had built with Edward.

Your hands, aged and bent from the arthritis that had seeped into your bones years before, carefully poured tea from a china teapot. Each movement, though slow, was precise and filled with purpose. The boiling water transferred from one of those kettles that hummed a happy tune when things were ready to be made into action. A comforting song. It was the thick British kind of tea. Sweet with sugar and softened with milk. The kind that only grandmothers knew how to make. My heart was heavy with your love for Edward, the babies you had lost. Martha and Agatha could not have survived the harsh winters of this barren landscape. The violence of the sea had left their barely born bodies lifeless. You swaddled them in white wool. Their gravestones etched with sorrow beneath the wall of the sparse garden. You had tended the fish that Edward caught, trekked to the Sunday market, year upon year. Trudging through salt-laden wind, heavy with loss and the stench of the fish you had come to hate. But Edward? Edwards you had loved. I could touch it. Hold it. He was a man borne from the water. Silent. Unchallenging. He knew how to appreciate what he loved. He knew you, and that gave you comfort. Even in grief. When he drowned, that summer, you were not surprised by it. It was a fitting end for a man who had been birthed by Neptune. You were not surprised at all. But it bore into you, this loss, this broken loneliness. Age and the brittleness of the ocean's cruelty left you with little mobility. You would soon die. And you weren't afraid. You were ready.

Acceptance smells like honeysuckle.

I would go back there many years later. I would know this place. I knew it the second we reached the sea. You held my hand. Pulse to pulse. I inherited your whole life.

All of it.

My name came like an owl's screech. Bitter and broken and ready to kill.

I traipsed behind my mother before breaking into unadulterated, uncontrollable sobs. I would know that kind of grief again, but the first time is a memory that is branded on your soul. A mark you can never erase. A feeling that will never leave. "You have a much lower pain threshold than me," she said pointedly and rather proudly. I felt like I should congratulate her. Shake her hand or something. But said nothing.

I glanced back. I couldn't help myself. She was there, still nestled in her wheelchair, huddled in a white woollen blanket. She raised her head slightly and nodded gently, before an almost imperceptible wink of a vivid brown eye, containing an iris full of life. She knew, and in her eyes, I saw the recognition that I knew too.

In that etherised moment, we both knew: the real pain was no longer in my finger