Porous

People do not have to tell me
when something is wrong.

They become quieter
and I feel the missing words.

A different rhythm in their breathing.
A pause where there wasn't one yesterday.
The slight rearranging of a face
that still insists it is fine.

I notice.

I always notice.

Sometimes I think
this is a skill.

A strange little talent
for slipping beneath another person's skin
without being invited.

Perhaps it is why
I am good at telling stories.

Give me a character
and I will find the wound
they never mention.

Give me a villain
and I will write the childhood
that taught them to become one.

Give me a stranger at a tavern table
with three lines of dialogue
and I will know
what they lost before they arrived.

I am a Dungeon Master.

I make worlds full of people
who do not exist
and somehow
I know exactly why they hurt.

I can improvise a history
for a nameless merchant,
a dead king,
a monster behind a locked door—

and when the players finally kill it,
I can tell them
what its last thought was.

Perhaps that is what I do
outside the game, too.

I give everyone a backstory.

The cruel person had a reason.
The angry person had a wound.
The distant person had a fear.
The selfish person was once
someone who needed something
and never learned how to ask.

I keep rolling for insight
until everyone makes sense.

Everyone except me.

Because people do not have to say
they are hurting.

I hear it in the silence.

I see it in the way
their jokes land half a second late.

I notice the difference
between I'm tired
and please don't ask me why.

I know when someone
has started disappearing
while still standing in front of me.

And I absorb it.

Not deliberately.

It simply happens.

Their sadness enters
like smoke beneath a door.

Their fear settles
somewhere behind my ribs.

Their anger becomes a weather
I can feel changing
before they know there is a storm.

Everyone calls this empathy.

Sometimes I think
it is just having no walls.

And perhaps that is why
I can be such a good storyteller.

Because I am always asking:

What would make someone
become this?

What wound?

What loss?

What hunger?

What invisible hand
has been moving the pieces?

I can understand almost anyone
if you give me enough time.

And that is the terrifying part.

Because eventually
you start doing it to yourself.

You turn your own pain
into a character sheet.

Depression:
high constitution,
low hope.

Fear:
long history of failed perception checks.

Anger:
probably a reaction to something deeper.

Exhaustion:
ongoing condition.

You keep explaining
why the character behaves this way
until you forget
that you are the character.

You keep searching for the tragic backstory
until suffering becomes something
you can narrate beautifully
but never escape.

And maybe that is why
I am so afraid
of never getting better.

Not because I cannot understand
where my darkness came from.

I understand it too well.

I can name every monster.

I can tell you
what made each one.

I can explain their motives,
their wounds,
their patterns,
their weaknesses.

I could write an entire campaign
about how they came to exist.

But knowing the monster's backstory
has never been the same thing
as killing it.

Sometimes I think
I have spent my whole life
being the Dungeon Master
of my own suffering—

giving every demon
a reason to stay,

giving every wound
a voice,

giving every darkness
a sympathetic origin story.

And maybe that is my curse:

I am so good at understanding
why everything hurts
that I have almost forgotten
I am allowed to stop hurting.