An Empath In India

Chapter 1 - Fate and a Big Bang

It isn't that I don't believe in fate, I just don't think it pays a lot of attention to me. Maybe it is because of who...or what I am. Of course, to be fair, I don't really know what I am. I know that what I can do isn't normal, maybe not even human. I know that I don't remember...well, anything before about 2 years ago.

Here's what I know: My name is Chase Jackson and I'm a girl, that is to say I have all the...parts for a human girl. I appear to be in my mid-twenties. I'm about 5' 4", have light brown hair, brown eyes, and a smile that "lights up a room" (at least that's what people tell me all the time).

As for what I can do, that's a little complicated. In its simplest form, I can feel other people's emotions. Oh how I wish it were that simple though. Imagine you are looking at a crowded scene, maybe a busy shopping mall or a carnival. Now imagine that scene painted, and each person in it is a different color depending on their mood. The bubbly cashier is bright pink, the happy couple in cool reds, and the man jealous of them in green. Now, instead of seeing all these colors, you feel them. I know, you can't "feel colors." You might even be tempted to point put that this is simply me picking up on subtle body language cues and misinterpreting them in a form of synnesthesia (as you can probably guess, this is what the last shrink I saw told me).

Again, I wish it were so simple. In fact, until about a week ago, I had almost deluded myself into believe the psycho babble Dr. Ruiz (my shrink) was feeding me. But then, the incident at the market occured.

I live in New Delhi, India, and like I do on most weekends, I was at one of the local markets. I enjoy being at the market because of the crowds of people running around, each with their emotions on edge. It's kinda funny all the things you notice about human emotions when you can feel the emotions of everyone around you. For example, when people are in large groups, their emotions impact the emotions of the people around them, and vice versa. The stronger the emotions, the bigger the impact. As a result, people typically feel uncomfortable crammed together in large groups, because their own emotions are battling with the emotions of the people around them. To me, it feels like dropping a bunch of different colors of paint into a bucket of water and slowly stirring it.

This particular weekend though, something went wrong. A man walked around the corner, coming down the row of stands I was lazily wandering down. He looked normal enough, dark skin, average height, nice clothes, but not so nice as to be out of place, and clean shaven. But he felt anything but normal. I could feel the red of his rage stronger than the emotions of any of the people around me. The emotion was so pure, I knew something was wrong.

Normally, a person has a bunch of emotions flowing through them at the same time, and in varying degrees. I can feel the primary emotion, the one that is most noticeable to that person, stronger than the others, but I feel the others too. The events in ones' past leave permanent marks on the person's emotional canvas. For example, the death of a loved one, especially a child or significant other, alters the emotions of that person forever. At a funeral, the grey of grief practically overpowers all the other emotions in the person. Slowly, sometimes over weeks, months, or years, it looses most of its strength, but it never goes away permanently. That person's entire life is affected by that loss from then on. Of course, grief is not the only emotion with such strength. The birth of a child, and the yellows of joy that come with it are permanent too. I have often speculated that this leads to women becoming more "motherly" after the birth of their first child.

Anyways, the fact that there was no other emotion besides rage inside this man showed an unusual single-minded purpose. Because that purpose was centered in rage, I knew something terrible was about to happen, and I wasn't the only one. As I've said, the emotions of people effect the people around them. As this man walked through the row of stalls, the colors of the customers and shop owners he passed were changed. To them, it was a feeling similar to goosebumps, or just a "bad feeling," and even though it was a minor change, it was enough for everyone to feel a tension in the air even though no one besides me knew the cause.