She Absorbs People’s Pain

In this world, pain could be transferred.

Not the pain of broken bones or sickness—but emotional pain. The silent kind that lived behind the ribs and whispered at night. Grief. Shame. Regret. That could be handed to someone else.

Very few people were born able to take it.

Mira was one of them.

Her office was hidden above a bakery that always smelled of warm sugar and bread. There was no sign on the door. People found her through rumors, late-night searches, and quiet recommendations. They climbed the narrow staircase and sat across from her in a pale blue room with a small wooden table between them.

They called her a pain taker.

Clients told her everything—the accident they survived, the betrayal they couldn’t forget, the childhood that never felt safe. As they spoke, Mira would reach forward and take their hands.

The transfer was invisible.

To them, it felt like setting down a heavy stone they had carried for years. Their breathing slowed. Their shoulders relaxed. Some wept with relief.

To Mira, it felt like drowning.

Their memories flooded into her—not just the story, but the sensations. The sharp smell of gasoline before impact. The echo of a door slamming for the last time. The cold brightness of hospital lights. When it was over, they left lighter.

Mira stayed behind, shaking.

At first, she believed she could control it. She kept journals—thick black notebooks stacked neatly in her apartment. Each page labeled with initials and dates. She wrote reminders in steady handwriting:

This grief is Daniel’s.

This fear of water is not mine.

This memory of a red bicycle does not belong to me.

But pain does not stay in its place. It seeps.

After years of carrying other people’s suffering, the boundaries blurred. She woke in the night crying for losses that weren’t hers. She flinched at smoke from ovens though her home had never burned. The subway doors closing made her chest tighten with someone else’s panic.

One evening, brushing her teeth, she caught her reflection and didn’t recognize the exhaustion in her eyes.

Who are you? she wondered.

The answer came quietly.

She was walking past the old playground on Maple Street when a wave of loneliness struck her—the deep, hollow ache of a father who had lost his son. She had taken it months ago. This time it surged so strongly she stumbled.

The air shifted.

The rusted playground transformed. Swings gleamed. Paint looked fresh and bright. Golden light spilled across the slide, and faint laughter drifted through the air though no children were there.

Her heart pounded.

As the loneliness eased, the playground flickered back—metal rusted, paint peeling.

Mira stood frozen.

The pain inside her was reshaping reality.

After that, it happened again. A woman’s regret stained the sky in impossible sunset colors. A man’s buried rage split thin cracks through the pavement. The world bent around whatever emotion burned brightest within her.

Reality could not tell the difference between her feelings and its own.

And the more pain she absorbed, the more unstable everything became.

One night, surrounded by trembling walls and stacked journals, Mira closed her eyes.

What is mine?

She pushed past layers of чуж grief until she found something small and steady: her grandmother’s laugh in a sunlit kitchen. The scent of cardamom tea. The warmth of being held without needing to be fixed.

She focused on it.

The room steadied. The air calmed.

Mira understood. The pain had power because she allowed it to erase her. Reality followed the strongest emotion inside her. If she disappeared beneath everyone else’s suffering, the world would fracture with her.

But if she remembered herself—clearly, firmly—the world might hold.

The next morning, she unlocked her office and looked at the empty chair.

She would still help people.

But she would no longer take everything.

Instead, she would teach them how to face their pain without giving it away.

For the first time in years, the memories inside her felt quieter.

Not gone.

Just no longer in control.