—prologue:
you feel too much

"DESPITE HOW SMART SHE WAS,
SHE DIDN'T THINK WITH HER HEAD,
SHE THOUGHT WITH HER HEART."

When Jackson was 6, she experienced another person's emotion for the first time.

    The girl's name was Lindsay, and she had fallen off her scooter, fell onto the asphalt, and scraped her knee. While it may have been obvious that she was in pain, Jackson felt the overwhelming need to touch her. So she reached out her hand, the pads of her nimble fingers making contact with Lindsay's wrist. It was almost instantaneous with the way she felt tears welling up in her eyes, her heart twisting up in a bruising twinge. She cried, almost borderline wailing like a banshee with how much she was feeling—it almost felt she had fallen off her scooter, too. After Jackson let go and Lindsay got help, her mother got called into the office, was relayed the entire encounter, and was swift to give her a pair of leather gloves when they got home, almost as if she'd known the whole time. Jackson didn't question it, she had an idea as to what they could be protecting her from—or vice versa.

    Jackson Edwards was an empath, plain and simple. She was an emotionally intelligent woman—and an intelligent woman overall—and she prided herself in wearing her war-torn heart on her sleeve. It had taken a lot to get to where she was, being able to keep those leather gloves on her and keeping her hands to herself. It felt like her hands were cut off, but she could still feel this phantom tingling any time she took them off when she finally got home. It felt as though she couldn't see. Some needed their eyes to actually figure out what was going on around them, Jackson needed her hands to see, to feel, no matter how long she had managed to go without them. But she was burdened with the ingrained fear that she'd override her system if she got too close to anyone and absorbed anything they felt.

    Her mother had warned her constantly about the dangers of taking her leather gloves off. Jackson knew now that she didn't pose that much of a threat to the people around her but taking in too much all at once would cause great strain to her psyche. So she kept the gloves on, mostly for her own safety. (She later came to the shattering realization that her mother was afraid of her but we don't have time to unpack all of that.)

    There was one time Jackson took a chance to take her leather gloves off. She was fresh out of Yale University, Master's degree in hands, her head full of hopes. As smart as she was, no science could explain and no math could add up to the enigma that was Jackson's first boyfriend (all the high school boys were afraid of her and the one girl she liked didn't like her back). He was intelligent, graduated from Harvard Law and worked as a first-year associate at a prestigious law firm. During the first six months of their relationship, it had been an absolute fairytale for her—lots of romantic dates, hand holding, and mind-enhancing conversations about the world around them and each other. Her eidetic memory had soaked it all up like a sponge, making it that much harder for her to shake anything that had happened to them, writing her brain off as the most beautiful and worrisome part about her.

    The seventh month had been the turning point, and their one-year anniversary had been the final straw. Life got busy and Jackson began to see her boyfriend less and less. He came home from the office late, later than the usual time. And whenever he did come home on time, he'd brush her off with a kiss to her forehead and tell her he was too tired and would then turn in early. "Happy anniversary," Jackson muttered before sifting for the white wine in the cooler that she had gotten for the occasion, downing the bottle as the night went on.

    A month after the relationship ended, Jackson took on a newer, worse approach. She decided that she was going to shove all of her emotions into a box, tape it up, and put them on a high shelf, and just turn herself off. Since being emotional got her nowhere, she wondered where being emotionally unavailable would take her. It didn't take her far, but at least she wasn't the one getting hurt—even if all the constant, senseless touching made her more numb by the minute. She got to care a little bit, even if it was for a one night stand and an orgasm. But on the nights where she didn't want to act like she didn't have a heart, she sat on the floor beside her bed and cried. She cried and let out all of the pent up emotion she couldn't push down and let her heart shatter and fall apart so she wouldn't get choked up on her own tears.

    This façade, this charade went on for a year before she just couldn't take it anymore. So she brought the box down, dusted it off, and opened it back up, letting herself feel what she refused to feel in a long time. This time around, she was warm and welcoming, keeping herself at arms' length with everyone, careful to not let herself get crushed. She was careful, her gloves were back on, having learned her lesson. But she let herself work through her emotions, letting herself process them instead of tossing them out.

    She got a heart-shaped tattoo on her upper arm to prove it.