Illness.

Is it possible for a person to be so ill or miserable that their condition has an effect on someone else located an arbitrary distance away?

Some sets of twins supposedly have this characteristic: when you're cut, we both bleed. This telepathy is cultivated by shared nature, and shared nurture.

What about outside such an immediate family environment? What does it mean when Bluefish, in Canberra, has been cut and I in England metaphorically bleed for her?

The romantic in me rushes to the surface and cries: this is the ultimate expression of love! To be joined in an intimate, lockstep dance with the sick girl from whom I am separated by thousands of miles of ocean!

In ecstasy, we point out where the malfunctoning of one is replicated and amplified in the other. This love needs no external validation, for it exists haughtily above the abyss of men in their dirt and cowardice!

Yet although we are correct, we are mistaken. It is true that when Bluefish suffers, I concurrently suffer, waking up from bad dreams with an anguished yell. We are one: you with your neck; and I with my nightmares. In the near future when the surgeons pull out your agony by its roots, and kill it stone dead, I too shall shed blood.

There, though, the correlation ends. When the toxins which are presently polluting your system are a fading memory, I'll still spend my sleeping time bellowing out the past, existing uncomfortably in this unnatural furrow, returned indefinitely to the stale, sweating pit in which I've spent all but five weeks.