She's very upset.
"I'm an empath," she tells me. "I'm very empathic."
"So, you can read minds?" I ask.
"No, no," she says, as if to a small child. "I'm empathic. That means I can sense emotions."
"Ah, and how do you sense emotions, actually?" I ask. This is a reasonable question. If she can't read minds, but can can read emotions, I'd like to know the difference. "For example," I add. "If you were in a room with another person, you could sense if they were angry or happy or afraid or turned on or desperate to leave the room?"
"Yes!" she says. Evidently, I'm getting it.
"So," I add. "This empathy is unusual. It's not something any normal person has?"
"No, very unusual," she tells me. "I mean, we all have some empathic ability, but a rare few of us truly have a sense of the emotions around us. Very strong emotions can affect us deeply and even cripple us."
"Like when I cry at the end of Escape from Planet of the Apes," I say. Maybe I am getting it!
"No, no, that was just from a movie. It's an artificial response."
"So then when my girlfriend dumps me and I cry. That's empathic?"
"Still not quite. That's real, but it's happening to you. Empathic means the emotions around you affect you."
"But not my own."
"No."
"So, when I freak out at things happening to me, that's fairly normal, but when I freak out at something happening to someone else, then that's a gift?"
"That's empathic!" she announces.
"Okay, but there's one more question I have."
"Sure," she says.
"If you were in a room, where you couldn't hear anything and couldn't see past the walls and couldn't smell anything and someone at random was in the other room, could you tell how they were feeling? I mean accurately"
"Well, not really. I could guess. But a lot of it is observation."
"And this empathy leaves you in such a crippled state?" I ask. "When it's not even your problem in the first place?"
She seems upset again. "You're not being very supportive," she says.
"Well," I tell her. "It seems to me that what you're calling "empathy", I would call "sympathy", which is not really a bad thing. But the fact that you let it affect you so deeply suggests you either know dick about boundaries, or don't really care about them, either of which suggests to me that you're wasting air I could be breathing. I suppose it's also possible that you are mentally ill, perhaps schizophrenic or even psychotic, and either don't realize it or do realize it, but refuse to take your meds. Furthermore, by assigning a magical power to this phenomenon in order to explain away your inability or unwillingness to actually define a few boundaries and by making a fuss about it around other people, you're attempting to manipulate the emotions of others in a classic passive-aggressive technique in order to further support your disability and for the sole purpose of gaining attention. So, in that regard, your empathic ability to determine my unwillingness to support this lame-ass charade is, essentially dead-on."
She seems upset. It's always women. Except for...
He approaches me. "You've upset her," he observes. "You know, I'm very empathic and I can sense these things."
I nod and look over to her. She still seems very upset, but now she gathers some support from his assertion. She gets behind him, her hands on him, almost pushing him between us, like a cross at a vampire. Or something. On one hand, I'm envious -- he's obviously figured out how best to get laid by her. On the other hand, by now, I wouldn't slap her with someone else's dick.
I smile at them. "You guys so deserve each other."