He's telling me a story. He's a good story teller. I admire people who can find words in their mouths. Mine stick in my hands and my head, beating like moths against my skull and fluttering in my fingers. I enjoy listening to him, even though it's a sad story. He tells it well.
Even without the words I would know it's a sad story. He wears it on him. His body changes, his eyes focus elsewhere, on remembering, on finding the words. He pulls them from his past and he gives them to me, forming images. I am there with him in this memory. His dejection creeps through the air and I feel it seeping into me. He has felt sadness and loss--he feels it now again, and as he feels it, I feel it too.
It's so clean and clear. So easy to understand and interpret. The air shimmers with particles of his emotions, and they touch my pores, becoming my own. There is a sense of comfort for me, even through this sad story, that I can connect to him on this level. Gratitude.
For so long Dorian altered my radar. His words did not match the feeling in the air. His face did not match his stories. I have loved who I am, this person who senses what others feel because it becomes me, too. To feel one thing to be told another, to see an expression that does not match the sharp edge on my skin that he is sending me, it confused me. Sonar blocked. My internal guide distressed and uncertain.
He is telling me a sad story; he is sad, I am sad. Simple. I can't get enough of it, this honesty. My analytical mind wants to poke and pry, to uncover more emotions so I can feel them with him, so I can understand him entirely, but it is late and I am tired and I am making him sad with my poking and he is making me sad with his sadness so I calm my roving questions and I just appreciate what I am being given. Truth.
My boss has wide wet eyes that are always looking into mine, and he asks me why I'm agitated, what's been going on. I cannot hide my truths. I alter the air around me with the darkness I've carried in recently and I cannot shroud it, so I take it with me. I try to keep it away from others. I do not want it to leak into them. But he has sensed it anyway, and now it leaks out my eyes, mortifying me. I cry without purpose, face still and I look away until the horrifying honesty of tears has slowed.
I glimpse honesty all around me and I marvel that Dorian was so false. How can a person look another in the eye and lie? I felt the lies all around me, I was covered in razor blades and suspicion, but I let his words overwhelm what I knew was true. It is incomprehensible. He looked me in my leaking eyes and he lied, he told me the sensations cutting my skin were my own, my own fault, my own imagining.
My skin feels soft and whole again without him destroying me, the scabs are healing over in smooth white scars.
I see the truth in people's faces, their bodies match their words. The air they carry around them moves in rhythm to what they say, and I want to weep with gratitude.
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