Being a kid isn't easy, especially not when you can see dead people.

Everywhere I went, the spirits always found me. Sometimes, they were scared and confused, completely unaware that they were dead. They wondered why I was the only person acknowledging them, asking me the same questions over and over again, "Where am I? Why isn't anyone answering me? Who are you? What happened?"

I could feel their every emotion because of yet another "gift" I have called empathy. It always messed with my head, making me wonder which emotions were mine and which ones were other people's. I never had many friends because of it. People would always say that I was copying them, acting sad when they were to gain attention for myself. Little did they know that I actually felt the same way they did because of my empathy.

I can also read minds, to a certain degree. I really consider this an extension of my empathy. I can hear thoughts, sometimes answering silent questions aloud because I thought I had been asked them. This is yet another thing that people didn't like about me. They also apparently don't like it when you constantly finish their sentences for them when they take too long to say it or forget a word.

All in all, people thought I was creepy. I talked about ghosts, talked to ghosts, felt every emotion everyone else was feeling, and could tell you exactly what you were thinking. Not exactly the most welcoming kind of person.

So, from early childhood through my young adult life, I was a loner. My only friends were the few spirits who hung around me because they had nothing better to do, my parents, my younger brother, and this one guy named Ray.

My brother, Mikey, and Ray are both psychic too. Mikey can kind of see spirits. He sees them as orbs instead of full out seeing them as people the way I do. He can also feel other people's emotions, but not at the same intensity as me. Ray is full on empathetic. That's the focus of what he does, empathy and mind-reading. Both of them are better able to hide their abilities than I am. They can ignore what's going on in reality and focus only on the physical world, whereas everything is always jumbled up in my head.

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Sometimes spirits are covered in blood. When people die in a tragic accident and don't realize they're dead, they don't realize that they can changed their appearance. Imagine seeing a young woman in her twenties walking down the street, confusion written on her face. You can tell that's she's afraid because you feel a cold, sick feeling in the pit of your stomach that radiates from her. You see glass embedded in her face, skin torn apart and blood pouring down, her arms crushed to the point where they are completely flat and you can see that they're slightly swollen and purple. You look to your left, and see a car completely crumpled, an ambulance, the police, and a body bag. The body bag is just being zipped, and you watch as the woman's face disappears into the black bag.

"I'm dead..." the woman says, her eyes vacant as she tries to grasp what just happened to her.

"Yep," you say nonchalantly. She turns away from her body and looks at you as you walk away.

That is the world I live in.