Human emotion is a deeply fascinating thing for me. I’ve studied it at length, observing how people react to certain situations or to other people; to nonhumans, to pain. To joy. Truthfully, I’ve seen a lot more pain than joy in the people I’ve studied. Based on my keen observations, I’ve categorized what I consider the key emotions human beings display: affection, hunger, sadness, anger. Each emotion has a range. Affection, for instance, can go from simple tolerance to pair bonding. Hunger, simply the desire for dinner, or pit-deep starvation leading to bad decisions. Sadness is sometimes just frustration, even boredom. But in its most provocative form, it is grief. Anger, though, is my specialty. I can sense the slightest beginnings of it, even before the subject realizes that a simmering, boiling, festering anger is about to erupt. Variations on these four are kind of like stew, a mix of this and that, sometimes flavorful, sometimes not. Love and anger, hunger and sadness. What’s interesting most to me is the layering of emotion human beings experience. Not mood, although that’s certainly an ingredient, but a spectrum of emotion. It is my greatest pleasure to suss out the various layers of emotion in a person, to read the underlying, the core, and the surface, layers of the geology of human experience.
In any case, when I met the girl, Cody, I knew right away that she was a unique case. So I did what I always do: I gave her a good examination, taking in the deeply personal details of her. Clues to her state of mind. It didn’t take but a moment to recognize that she was vibrating with emotion. The unschooled, inexperienced among us might interpret her attitude as hostility, or anger. But, as I said, I’m an expert on anger, and this was something far more destructive. This was bone-deep fear.
Not to brag, but I have a knack for making people relax, getting them to share their thoughts and deepest desires with me. Maybe even bare their souls to me. All it takes is my brand of uncritical acceptance, unconditional and neutral, a safe kind of repository for secrets. This girl needed my kind expertise.
So, I wagged my tail.