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kairosclerosis n. the moment you look around and realize that you’re currently happy—consciously trying to savor the feeling—which prompts your intellect to identify it, pick it apart, and put it in context, where it will slowly dissolve until it’s little more than an aftertaste.
looseleft adj. feeling a sense of loss upon finishing a good book, sensing the weight of the back cover locking away the lives of characters you’ve gotten to know so well.
idlewild adj. feeling grateful to be stranded in a place where you can’t do much of anything—sitting for hours at an airport gate, the sleeper car of a train, or the backseat of a van on a long road trip—which temporarily alleviates the burden of being able to do anything at any time and frees up your brain to do whatever it wants to do, even if it’s just to flicker your eyes across the passing landscape.
justing n. the habit of telling yourself that just one tweak could solve all of your problems—if only you had the right haircut, if only you found the right group of friends, if only you made a little more money, if only he noticed you, if only she loved you back, if only you could find the time, if only you were confident—which leaves you feeling perpetually on the cusp of a better life, hanging around the top of the slide waiting for one little push.
ringlorn adj. the wish that the modern world felt as epic as the one depicted in old stories and folktales—a place of tragedy and transcendence, of oaths and omens and fates, where everyday life felt like a quest for glory, a mythic bond with an ancient past, or a battle for survival against a clear enemy, rather than an open-ended parlor game where all the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.
zielschmerz n. the dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you started up in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could.
ONISM the awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience
But if someone were to ask you on your deathbed what it was like to live here on Earth, perhaps the only honest answer would be: “I don’t know. I passed through it once, but I’ve never really been there.”
vaucasy n. the fear that you’re little more than a product of your circumstances, that for all the thought you put into shaping your beliefs and behaviors and relationships, you’re essentially a dog being trained by whatever stimuli you happen to encounter—reflexively drawn to whoever gives you reliable
liberosis n. the desire to care less about things; to figure out a way to relax your grip on your life and hold it loosely and playfully, keeping it in the air like a volleyball, with quick and fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play.
KOINOPHOBIA the fear that you’ve lived an ordinary life
endzoned n. the hollow feeling of having gotten exactly what you thought you wanted, only to learn that it didn’t make you happy.
wellium n. an excuse you come up with to rationalize a disappointing outcome—telling yourself you weren’t in the mood for that sold-out show anyway, that your safety school is actually a better fit, that your dream job might have been a bit too stressful.
1202 n. the tipping point when your brain becomes so overwhelmed with tasks you need to do, you feel too guilty to put anything off until later, prioritizing every little thing at the top of the list, leaving you immobilized.
mottleheaded adj. feeling uneasy when socializing with odd combinations of friends and family, or friends and colleagues, or colleagues and family—mixing a medley of ingredients that don’t typically go together,
feresy n. the fear that your partner is changing in ways you don’t understand, even though they might be changes for the better, because it forces you to wonder whether your relationship needs a few careful nudges to fall back into balance, or perhaps is still as stable as ever, but involves a person who no longer exists.
lilo n. a friendship that can lie dormant for years only to pick right back up instantly, as if you’d seen each other last week—which
MOMENT OF TANGENCY a fleeting glimpse of what might have been
falesia n. the disquieting awareness that someone’s importance to you and your importance to them may not necessarily match—that your best friend might only think of you as a buddy, that someone you barely know might consider you a mentor, that someone you love unconditionally might have one or two conditions.
the kinder surprise n. the point in your early adolescence when you realize that your parents are muddling through their lives the same as you; that many respectable adults are no less lost than you and your friends, no less petty and obsessive and insecure, which makes you wonder if there are no real adults, because such a thing never actually existed, except in bedtime stories.
dorgone adj. wondering if you could slip away from an event or group conversation without anyone noticing your absence.
kenaway n. the longing to see how other people live their lives when they’re not in public; wishing you could tune in to the raw feed of another human existence, in all its messiness and solitude—shimmying in place while brushing their teeth, squabbling over where to put the shoes, talking out their problems on solitary commutes—if only to give you something to compare your own life against, and figure out whether you’re bizarrely normal or normally bizarre.
catoptric tristesse n. the sadness that you’ll never really know what other people think of you, whether good, bad, or if at all—that
aftergloom n. the pang of loneliness you feel the day after an intensely social event, as the glow of voices and laughter fades into a somber quiet.
nyctous adj. feeling quietly overjoyed to be the only one awake in the middle of the night—sitting alone with a laptop and a cup of tea or strolling down the center line of an abandoned street—taking in the world like an empty theater between productions, stripped down to a simple black box, open to be whatever you want it to be.
ZENOSYNE the feeling that time is getting faster
ANEMOIA nostalgia for a time you never experienced
echthesia n. a state of confusion when your own internal sense of time doesn’t seem to match that of the calendar—knowing that something just happened though it apparently took place seven years ago,
rasque n. a moment you instantly wish you could take back, feeling a pulse of dread right after crossing the point of no return—a blurted confession, a hurled insult, a final decision you’d been waffling over for months—wanting to take just one step backward in time, reverting to the way things used to be, in the halcyon days of just a minute ago.
o’erpine v. intr. to wander through the grounds of a cemetery, glancing over the gravestones as if you were people-watching the dead, imagining all the things they must have seen and the lives they might have led, trying to conjure up an entire biography from a handful of words and dates etched in granite, with barely more than a single dash to cover the unimaginable vastness of their experience.
spinning playback head n. the disorienting feeling of meeting back up with an old friend and realizing that you’ve become different people on divergent paths—that even though they’re standing right in front of you, the person you once knew isn’t really there anymore.
