His only weakness was.....madness

Interesting weaknesses make interesting characters. I decided to make a few character sketches based on a character having only one, peculiar weakness. Here's another one.     


    His only weakness was a crippling madness. It wasn’t with him all the time. Only when he ate certain foods, or didn’t get enough sleep, or if his mother called. He had a low grade madness that never went away, but the crippling madness was random and unreasonable. He would still try to function throughout the day, and it would be okay as long as no one looked at him or spoke about him in low tones to someone else. That drove him mad. 

    The world’s weight was too much. There was too much sadness in the world. There was too much greed and grief. There was happiness and joy around, but the balance was out of proportion and he felt it. It was suffering. He was suffering. He understood how all those people felt.  It was like he could hear their emotion or see their thoughts. Not just the people around him, but people around the entire planet. All people. All humans. All living things, even.  Plants and animals, the trees and the bugs.  

     He knew that all things are just atoms and molecules, vibrating, electrons and protons, whizzing around. They all put out a vibe, an energy, and he could feel it. It wasn’t acute, or sharp, or explosions of feeling, but it was a heaviness like gravity, immense, ineffable, inexorable. He could feel the remnant of a breakup in Stavropol, or a violence in Auckland, or loneliness in San Quentin. All of the emotions of the world, from every individual was vibrating at a certain frequency, which vibrated all the air molecules a bit, and vibrated the ground and the water, which caused a giant cloud of vibration across the planet and he was a giant antenna for it. He was an antenna for humanity’s state of being.  

    It was a wonder that he didn’t medicate, or mediate or end the madness himself. It was too much to bear, but it was borne.  True, there were innumerable positive vibrations going on, but those were part of the normal operating system. The positive was a quiet background noise that was always there. But the negative was impossible.  It lessened when he listed to music on his headphones. Music in the open made him think about it more, feeling it more. But when those cushy leatherish headphones snuggled his ears, closing in his world, he found peace. But he couldn’t hibernate forever. 

    He had encountered a few other people that had this same antenna. The conversations were brief and numbers were never exchanged. They had the same problem he did.   Whenever he met one and figured out that they felt the same thing he did, he would always get a sudden urge of relief. Relief that he was not alone. That he was normal, special even, but not an outsider, or alien or a robot. But that relief was always just a few minutes in length. It made his condition concrete.  Seeing his twin, or mirror in this world, caused more belief, more evidence that this was real and it would not go away if some magic pill was taken or he was electrocuted just right. It was not just some part of schizophrenia or bipolar or ADD. It was real and it didn’t have a name.