Little Red Light

Hi, so I’m Flaybelle.

My real name was Lorelai Rose, but empathing can take over your life like that. If you’re reading this in the time and place it was actually made, you know me already, and even looking through this is probably pointless. Do yourself a favor- find a better use of your time. You’ve wasted enough of your thoughts and feelings on little old me.

If you’re from somewhere else down the line, though- years, decades, centuries, however long we last- please read through this to the end. Hopefully, the things I made a living off of are illegal now, but if people forget about them, they will come back. If you want to hold a pendulum in place, you’ll need some way to block it. Consider this article your stopper.

I got my start when I was only twenty-three. I wasn’t desperate, wasn’t poor. I had low self esteem and a pain tolerance like nobody’s business. Shit still hurt, but the hurt was textureful to me. I don’t wanna say it felt good at the start- mostly just don’t want to be remembered that way- but yes, it was an interest of mine. I think besides this making me able to do the job, my output would not have been nearly so well-liked if it wasn’t for my appreciation of my body’s reactions to things it did not want.

If you live in a world without empathing, it’s going to be a bit hard to explain. What should I compare it to? Streaming? Storytelling? Surely one of those words still means something to you. The name is somewhat misleading. If anything, the audience are the ones “experiencing empathy” when they connect, but I’m the empather. Notably not the “empath” because that would be the inverse. 

While the concept is heady the execution is simple. I have nodes installed in my nervous system that will never leave me. They read my pain and transmit it as data. And in my chest- there’s a light. No brighter than an LED if you look at it through all the skin, just a little indicator to show I’m live. Like a camera.

I connect to my computer, and then they connect to me. Sometimes I shared video, other times I left them blind. There are people who prefer either. A sizeable percentage of my personal belongings are toys- in a historical word, “weapons,” but when medicine advanced to the point where painkillers and regenerative formulas didn’t have to be as temporary, anything short of something that disintegrated a body on the spot was considered a playful novelty. I have a lot of blades, mallets, a gun. Most necessarily, more salt than I would ever need for cooking.

I was around to see a small hobby generally considered masochistic blow up into something mainstream, the word “masochism” in itself somewhat splitting into multiple synonyms that became their own concepts. What I do is considered an act of “sharing empathy,” thus the name. It’s socially acceptable now. People watch sad movies to cry, people watch me to scream. Only a subgroup of them do it to come.

I have mostly stopped judging any of these people. If I vilify one group, it feels hard to justify the others. I don’t know if that’s the money they’ve given me over the years talking, or if I’ve just lost it, but… I dunno. It’s like trying to define art. Even arguing in that space feels a bit reductive. People have their wants, and they don’t always make sense, but that’s okay. I’m not a cop. I only want for no one in the future to try to provide what I did. I think it was irresponsible on my part to think I could sustain it, and there are better ways for those customers to feel something. It may be true that you don’t matter or that you’ll never find a way to live in harmony with your current society, but nobody’s forcing you to pick the absolute worst path on purpose. Even if it feels like the only way to stand out. If I had just gone into performance art, livestreaming, sex work, or even just sat in my room doing nothing, I would have wound up with far fewer regrets. I had talent, and I utilized it in the one way that I wasn’t suited for.

Drugs can take away the sting, but the damage you do to yourself will last even after you restore it. I can often feel like I have many, many copies of each limb. When I move my arm with any amount of speed, dozens of past arms trail behind it. When I walk, I feel other bodies stepping in unison behind me, lost from my actions but never forgotten. I suppose I should clarify for the poets of the future that I’m not speaking metaphorically- my body feels a bit like that of a Hindu God. If something gets cut off, the phantom pain doesn’t leave me when it’s regenerated anymore. I’ve done this so many times that it started to stack.

I often miss the chair when I try to sit down. Holding things is an impossibility, so my wife usually has to feed me. And my wife hasn’t come out of this unscathed, either. She thought she was into this. She believed very strongly that her lack of empathy was an internal thing, a core trait of hers that would allow her to inflict on me the pain she did. Even at the time this was an incredibly archaic belief. People had only told her she was unempathetic because of how she acted, and it gave her the false, somewhat sad belief that she was capable of hurting other people if they wanted it.

We found out pretty quickly that she couldn’t be helping me with this job, but she’s still dealing with the consequences of it years down the line. And even then it took me until now to realize I was coping with the consequences of hurting myself too- it didn’t matter that I was the one suffering the damage, I was still hurting someone. And that might feel fine in the moment if you really don’t care for yourself, but it catches up to you. The looks my wife gave me as we were both going to therapy yet I was still putting in hours flagellating myself still haunt me.

If you think you are capable of destruction, or capable of being destroyed without any repercussions to your mind- you are wrong. There are no cases of true emotional psychopathy or invincibility as I see it. It all catches up to you in the end, even if not in the same way it did me. Just because it was legal, I have engaged more depravity in my life than potentially any killer who has ever lived. It never got easier, I just convinced myself it had. You can justify it, but it won’t stop hurting you. You won’t stop getting worse.

On the fifth of last month, my light started shining when I wasn’t live. I went to a doctor, but they couldn’t turn it off. I ended up deleting all my accounts for empathing, even the one that had amassed as many followers as there were people in my country. That felt almost as much like cutting a piece off of myself as actually cutting a piece off of myself, but it felt necessary. As an empather, that defined on and off switch is all you have left. Without it, anyone can live your life. Anyone can become you with the press of a button. Instead of feeling you cut and bleed, thousands can feel you eat, fuck, and shit. It is the most invasive, traumatizing thing you can experience, and I know that because it happened to me. Even with all my links deactivated, all my accounts erased- people still found their way in. And for longer than I’d like to admit, other people resided in my body for what was with no doubt the worst period of my life, more so than ripping skin or taking bullets.

As I write this, I’ve just been told that I’m going to die. I had the sensors attempt to be removed- to receive another nervous system, one that cost money I could only have accrued by doing this so much in the first place- and it didn’t work. They’ve haphazardly set my corrupted nerves back in my body where they were, and as I wait for my life to end, that little red light is still glowing.

I wonder what it will feel like for them when I die.