Handled

Some people love to be seen near pain.

They lower their voices.
They arrange their faces.
They ask an insulting question
and trust the softness of their tone
to keep it from being insulting.

One of them knew far too much about my life
to pretend her question came from care.
She knew what I do.
She knew what I carry.
She knew enough to know
that the question was not thoughtful.
It was patronizing
with good posture.

Another saw me tell the truth
about the year I was actually suicidal
and reported the post to the algorithm.

Like she was submitting a maintenance request.

Not a message.
Not a call.
Not even the courage
to be a human for five minutes.

Just a clean little handoff
to the machine.

There is something so vile about that.
So efficient.
So cowardly.
Taking a personal moment
and converting it into admin.
Calling that concern.
Calling that help.

That is not care.
That is disposal
in therapeutic language.

And then there are the ones who say
I’m here if you need me,
then spend five months
being nowhere.

That sentence means nothing to me now.
It belongs to the same family
as every polished lie
people tell
when they want to be mistaken for kind.

That is what I am angry about.

Not awkwardness.
Not failure.
Not ordinary human limitation.

Performance.

The small, polished theater of empathy.
The way some people hover
at the edge of suffering
like they are trying on a new look.
The way they use another person’s pain
to brighten their own reflection.
The way they want the credit
for caring
without ever having to carry anything.

They like the posture of tenderness.
They like the atmosphere of depth.
They like to feel safe, gentle, evolved.
They like the little moral glamour
of standing near damage
while keeping their shoes clean.

And I am embarrassed
by how long I mistook that
for character.

I do not need to be monitored.
I do not need to be processed
in a soft voice.
I do not need my pain
filed upward like a leak in the ceiling.
I do not need one more person
offering conditional tense
as if it is shelter.

I needed a friend.

Just that.

A friend with enough spine
to remain real
once sadness stops being interesting.

Because that is the part nobody admits:
pain gets boring
very quickly
to people who only like it
as a backdrop for their goodness.

This long, unpretty business of surviving.
The repetition.
The heaviness.
The fact that some days
the great achievement
is actually fucking eating dinner.

None of that flatters the observer.
None of that makes them feel luminous.
So they retreat into language.
A phrase.
A look.
A measured little performance of concern.
Then they disappear
before the sentence acquires weight.

And still
they expect to be called compassionate.

No.

I have been around too much real suffering
to be impressed by a soft voice.

I know what care looks like.
It is specific.
It is unglamorous.
It does not outsource itself.
It does not vanish.
It does not ask for applause
for almost meaning it.

What devastates me, still,
is not that these people failed.

It is that they wanted credit
for the shape of kindness
while withholding the substance.

They offered me
beautiful imitations
of human connection
and expected them to pass.

They do not pass.

I know counterfeits
when I touch them.