Perhaps soliloquy? --Tepes tepes A cynic is one who looks through rose colored glasses with a jaundiced eye. ---Attached Message--- Is it so hard to empathize, love? Is it so hard to place yourself inside another's life, think as they think, and feel as they feel? In the truest sense I want you to get over it. Run away from it. Heal from whatever it is about it that hurts you. I am not arrogant enough to ever want you to suffer because of me. You never want the people you love to suffer. I empathize with you and don't understand it. I feel your pains and your upsets and your frustration--above all the frustration!--and I don't understand it. I feel it, it echoes, it pounds, it screams from wall to wall in my head, breaking lightbulbs and making everything a little darker. I don't understand it. I developed a lifestyle years ago involving discomfort. If I didn't feel that it was too terrible to be suffered, then I would do it. It saved someone else from having to. So I was stoic. I accepted shit. I didn't complain, per se, but I made sure that my sacrifices were visible. People wondered at that. So I trudged along, the everyman messiah, taking your lumps so you wouldn't have to. I hurt for you. And, like all things practiced, I got good at it. Very little is a hardship when you plan for the hardship. Become a pessimist who likes surprises--no one is happier. And so I blossomed in my self-imposed adversity. Safe in my shield of perceived discomfort I can have whatever thoughts and feelings I want, without worry of hurting anyone else. I can philosophize and develop an encompassing worldview while I gather sympathy from the masses. i can be as cynical as I want to be, examine and dismiss everything that I can't find reason for existing. I can accept everything. And humility prevents me from believing that I am not the worst of persons. By necessity, my sins are the worst--I am the only one, safe in my shell, for whom there is no excuse. And so I stopped caring. I empathize, surely, but sympathy is harder. I can feel the duplicate of your feelings, but my actual feelings get quieter and quieter until they just stop being. As though an opiate was injected into the veins of my heart. It takes a lot to break that. And it takes continual effort to feel--not ask myself how I feel, inner dialog is easy and instantaneous--to actually play out my own emotions, let them ride me like voodoo gods until I am the thunder of wroth, the sleet of jealousy, or the dawn-time of passion. Affection is there for everyone, with few exceptions. I couldn't be who I am without adoring each and every snotty face of humanity, breathing their halitosis and rubbing their morning wood--like Odin growing breasts, the all-father/mother, everything for everyone. Affection is there for everyone, but few get real emotion. And they usually complain about that. And so we're back to the start. You say I'm cold. If I'm cold, it's because I care too much. You say I'm dense. If I'm dense it's because I can't understand your emotion. You say I'm distant. If I'm distant it's because I really am somewhere else. I am what you want--within limits imposed by those whose claims on my time precede or supercede your own. I am one giant fucking pyramid scheme, so get in on the ground floor and get a larger piece of the pie. What I want is for you to be happy with that. It's all you have. And if you can't be happy with what you have, greedy girl, it's up to you, not me, to find a way to get more.