B43
Public Record
Excerpt from poetry collection: Clinical Poetry Vol. XVI

Relative Psychology: Using Great Tragedies to predict relational acuity.

humans seek out other humans

who have felt pain
similar to the pains they felt
during their Great Tragedy.

we asked volunteers to describe their Great Tragedy,
and then matched participants with similar experiences.
these people did not know each other;
they knew only that they were matched based on their Great Tragedy.
participants were allowed to speak for thirty minutes
and were then asked about the conversation.

one participant, nadine, stated

“for a split moment, we were the same person.
i don’t know how else to say it.
we’d known each other for what, twenty minutes,
and somehow i was sitting in her hurt
and seeing on her face the hurt that i had felt
was feeling
and, it was like,
i don’t know it was like our skeletons melted away
and we were only all that we shared.”

Glosy Mantell