Sorrow-Eater

This happens with great frequency.  If I sit down in a public space, eventually someone, a complete stranger, will talk to me telling me things of a deeply personal and painful nature. Maybe they cry, maybe they stare into space while biting the words off in a monotone, but it happens to me more often than you might think.

Last night, I walked to my local pub for dinner and a quiet drink, and maybe to catch the last period of a hockey game.  I hadn't been in the place more than perhaps 15 minutes when a woman with an aura of sadness and long delicate fingers sat at a stool one down from me at the bar.

She ordered a drink, and I having been briefly distracted by her passing and motion, went back to watching hockey and waiting for my food.

"Cheers," she piped. "I'm not drinking alone!"

I turned, raised my beer saluted it in the customary fashion, asking "What are we drinking to?  A celebration?" I smiled, being polite.  It's a thing I force myself to do, politeness.  There's not enough of it in the world, so I'm trying to do my part.

And then began the litany of things; her son's maturity and impending move out of the house, the betrayals by her sister, the painful re-emergence of her son's father, the recent death of her grandfather, the horrible betrayals of her mother.  She cried. Multiple times. There was no room for words from me, even though she would pause and look like she wanted an answer. As soon as I had spoken a word, there were more from her, boiling, gasping out of her.

I offered the only solace I could, I listened. For almost two hours. I grew sad but when she wandered away she wasn't crying any more.

It's happened before.  Years ago, in LA, I was waiting for a bus.  I couldn't have been more than seventeen at the time, when a young man sat on the bench next to me and told me his life story in a monotone for an hour. I listened, nodded at the right places, and listened some more.  The details of his story have long faded, but I remember him walking away from the bus stop, his story told, with a lighter expression than when he'd seated himself.

It happens to me in diners, bars, parks, concerts. The speakers are all races, ages, sexes. Some have looked affluent, some destitute. Every one was profoundly sad.

There's an archetype out there in the world of the Sin-Eater.  These people would consume the sins of the dead, either preventing them from a undead state or allowing a burdened soul entry into Heaven, depending on your faith.

Perhaps that's a role for me, but instead of Sin, I eat Sorrow.

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