The Dreamweaver

You live partly somewhere else, and you bring things back. Beauty in ordinary places, the meaning underneath what was actually said, the atmosphere of a thing before anyone has words for it. You feel what is unspoken in a room within seconds of entering it, and you are almost always right. Whatever you make — a meal, a room, a piece of work, a sentence — has an atmosphere to it, and people cannot say why it moves them.

People love you for being met. With you, they are understood in the part of themselves they do not usually show.

The price is that you are porous. Other people's emotions enter you unlabelled and you experience them as your own, which means you can spend a day heavy with something that was never yours. You have very little membrane, and where a boundary should be there is apology instead. The solution offered to you is always the same — protect yourself, harden a little — and it will not work, because your permeability is not a defect. What is missing is not a wall. It is the ability to know whose feeling you are currently holding.