I feel for you. A Sunday or two ago, my roommate (B) brought these words to my attention. She’d been thinking about the phrase. “If elsewhere it sounds different.” 

We were at a coffee shop, sitting outside. It was a bright day, and very beautiful. We’d ordered opposites. Her drink cooled on the table between us. Mine melted. 

“It’s the layout of the phrase that’s funny. Like, that people can envision the situations of others,” she said. “That occupying them is what you should do.” I feel for you: I see you, I hear you, I am you, or trying my best to be. She worked her finger in a circle against her thumb.

Almost always, especially in conversations I later look back on, the subject seems to take form and suspend itself between the participants. I love when this happens. A statement — something raw and inconclusive, usually — becomes an image. A romantic relationship might materialize in my mind’s eye as a stack of printer paper. It could be something else. A keyhole. A supermarket. A planetary system. An object preloaded with metaphor. Or something more arcane. A bird on a ledge. A changing room with a curtain. A garage full of important junk. 

Say it’s a stack of paper. The image ebbs with the conversation. It becomes a loop that lengthens with each new thought, then involuntarily repeats, then lengthens, then repeats, until there’s a motion graphic beating like a raw little heart in the middle of our discussion. 

Say it’s a stack of paper and a different conversation. That we are talking about a relationship — maybe someone else’s, admittedly. Someone present suggests the relationship has a regenerative property. As easily as it succumbs, it remains. A breeze does something but doesn’t destroy. What we’re saying is they probably won’t break up. That what they are might be the best there is. 

The thought — succumb, remain — animates the image. Sheets of paper flurry upward and scatter, float down, return to the bottom of the stack. We begin to discuss something else. The image beats on without us. That’s my favorite part — the autonomy.

B plays with her words long enough for me to zone out and zone in. I feel for you. I realize that if we never drank our drinks, they would settle at the same temperature, mine plateauing first, cool forever. Then hers, cool for just as long. 

“What if it was, instead, ‘For you, I feel?’” 

She says this and suddenly the words are objects — fridge magnets, big. Prismatic in color. Maybe she sees the magnets, too. If not, she otherwise senses them; she splits the statement, using her hand as a knife, and moves the end to the front. For you, I feel.

“I see it,” I say, drawing a line through the dew that has gathered on my cup. The fridge magnets have been altered. The sentence reads anew. B squints, as if forming her interpretation through mine. What she is suggesting is a conditional statement. That someplace where the reason to feel precedes (or predates) the action of feeling (“for you,” begins the statement), it follows that empathy becomes less an act and more a state, flowing as continuously as the present tense itself (“I feel”). Feeling for others becomes for others, feeling. Attention does not occur in flashes. It goes and goes, like light, and we live in it.

“You see what I’m saying?” asks B. 

“Yeah, I think so.” 

“Maybe that’s too idealistic.” Her hands are on her chair now. She sits on them. Without thinking, I reach out and switch the words back. I feel for you. Again. For you, I feel. The words speed up, conducting themselves in a loop. It plays and we watch it like a campfire.

A long time ago, I wrote about a friend who was cutting herself. It looked bad. A little blood garden. I slept terribly for months. Sometimes it was me looking down: hand, razor, blood, sink. Sometimes it was two of me, one coming for the other, like depraved twins. I could not bear to look at my friend’s wrist, and she was always propping her head in her hand, moving her hair behind her ear. Things that could cut made me squeamish. Printer paper being one. And once, when I was helping a librarian shelve books, the sight of a barcode caused me to seize up completely. I thought about this time in my life for only a moment. B and I finished our coffees and walked on.

As far as I can tell, I only wrote about these phenomena once, in a journal: I am fascinated by the way that our worlds reconfigure to show us that the way to escape often is a loop made of the same material that haunts us toward a need for escape to begin with. We must do to ourselves what we cannot get over.

I didn’t do anything. To myself, nor for her. But what’s true is that I was disturbed. So deeply that the disturbance must’ve preceded (or predated) her episodes, my visions, me hurrying away from the library, me doing nothing. For her, I was already feeling. For her, I already felt. It would go and go, and we would live in it.