The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

by John Koenig

burn upon reentry n. the bitter disappointment upon finding no new messages after spending hours out of contact, as if the world had barely even noticed you had left. From the tendency of spacefaring objects to heat up upon reentering the atmosphere.

xeno n. the smallest measurable unit of human connection, typically exchanged between passing strangers—a warm smile, a sympathetic nod, a shared laugh about some odd coincidence—moments that are fleeting and random but still contain powerful emotional nutrients that can alleviate the symptoms of feeling alone. Ancient Greek ξένος (xénos), alien, stranger. Pronounced “zee-noh.”

Each of us is only ever a work in progress; we all have weaknesses we’re not sure how to fix. So why does it feel so surprising when we catch a glimpse of vulnerability in others? Why do we keep falling for the same old trick, when each of us spends so much time trying to get away with it ourselves? Who knows why we harbor such public confidence and such private doubts?

tillid adj. humbled by how readily you place your life into the hands of random strangers, often without a second thought—trusting a restaurant to check its expiration dates, trusting a construction crew not to cheap out on materials, trusting thousands of other drivers to stay in their lane—people who you may never meet but whose well-being you’re deeply invested in, whether you know it or not. Danish tillid, trust. Pronounced “til-id.”

anaphasia n. the fear that your society is breaking apart into factions that have nothing left in common with each other—each defending their own set of values, referring to their own cult figures, speaking in their own untranslatable language. From anaphase, the stage in cell division when sister chromatids are pulled apart to opposite sides of the cell + aphasia, the inability to comprehend or formulate language due to brain dysfunction. Pronounced “an-uh-fey-zhah.”

kinchy adj. feeling guilty that you care about your own petty concerns more deeply than faraway cataclysms—that a family spat hurts more than a civil war, that a three-day fever hits you harder than climate change. Japanese 近視 (kinshi), near-sightedness. A word just shy of kinship. Pronounced “kin-chee.”

fygophobia n. the fear that your connections with people will keep dwindling as you get older; that one by one, you’ll all go flying off the merry-go-round in wildly different directions, sailing through various classes and jobs and interests, ultimately landing in far-flung neighborhoods where you’ll hunker down with your families plus a handful of confidants you see a few times a year, perpetually reassuring each other, “We should keep in touch.” Greek φύγω (fýgo), I leave + -φοβία (-phobía), fear. Compare the Greek φυγόκεντρος (fygókentros), centrifuge. Pronounced “fahy-goh-foh-bee-uh.”

How strange it is that your life is the only one populated by this particular cast of characters.

Strange that no matter how predictable your life is, nobody in history has ever lived it before. Strange to think that your concerns are your business and yours alone.

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.

vellichor n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

aulasy n. the sadness that there’s no way to convey a powerful memory to people who weren’t there at the time—driving past your childhood home to show it to a friend, or pointing at a picture of a loved one you lost, only to realize that to them it’s just another house, just another face.

thwit n. a pang of shame when an embarrassing memory from adolescence rushes back into your head from out of nowhere, which is somehow no less painful even if nobody else remembers it happened in the first place.

Acronym of The Hell Was I Thinking?

blinkback n. the disillusionment of revisiting a pop-culture touchstone of your youth and finding that it hasn’t aged well at all—having to confront its cringey dialogue, hand-puppet characterization, and wildly implausible plotting—which only makes you wonder what else in your mental fridge is past its expiration date. Appalachian English (dialect) blinked, soured milk + back, in the past.

yeorie n. a certain scent that has the power to sweep you back to childhood—the acrid funk of bug spray, the earthy sweetness of dead leaves on wet asphalt, the rebellious twang of gasoline fumes in the summer heat. From yewthor, a pungent scent + yewre, water-bearer. Pronounced “yoh-ree.”

But you move as a rower moves: facing backward. You can see where you’ve been, but not where you’re going.

nowlings n. the total set of human beings alive at any given time, a group that nudges slightly forward whenever a new baby is born or the world’s oldest person dies, and turns over completely every hundred years or so; a random assemblage of billions of contemporaries who you feel an odd sense of connection to, because whatever problems we might face right now, we’re all facing them simultaneously.

halfwise adj. suddenly aware that you’re more than halfway through a vacation or semester or other positive experience, noticeably closer to the end than the beginning, as if someone had flipped your mental hourglass overnight, turning a rush of fun surprises into a trickle of last hurrahs.

You’d become all too aware how much life you keep trading for a pittance of salary, aware that tying your shoelaces wrong will cost you twenty beats, that posting a comment online might set you back three hundred, all of which might’ve been better spent elsewhere. You’d come to the end of a bad movie and whisper to yourself with some urgency, “That’s two hours of my life I’m never getting back.”

It may be a blessing that you never know how much time you have left, because it leaves you no other option but to listen to your heart and get into its rhythm, so you can focus on the things that make life worth living. So go ahead: make every second count, or don’t. Seize the day or while away the hours. All you have is this moment. That alone is a blessing. You’re almost out of time, and you have all the time in the world.

aftersome adj. astonished to think back on the bizarre sequence of accidents that brought you to where you are today—as if you’d spent years bouncing down a Plinko pegboard, passing through a million harmless decision points, any one of which might’ve changed everything—which makes your long and winding path feel fated from the start, yet so unlikely as to be virtually impossible. Swedish eftersom, because.

solla, solla, solla n. an incantation whispered privately to yourself to celebrate the loss of something or someone you loved, which almost makes it feel like a deliberate renunciation, consciously deciding to relinquish them to an earlier part of your life.

OLĒKA the awareness of how few days are memorable Your life is a highlight reel. You’d like to think that every moment has potential, that there’s something transcendent hidden all around. If you’d only stop to seize the day, you could hold on to it and carry it with you. But the truth is, most of life is forgotten instantly, almost as it’s happening. Chances are that even a day like today will slip through your fingers and dissolve into oblivion, washed clean by the tides.

Another day, another week, another year: such is the rhythm of ordinary time. Filled with long, featureless stretches we tend to skip over to get to the good parts. The thousand acts of maintenance you have to do every day. The labor of keeping your body going, hauling it back and forth across the same stretch of road, no closer than you were the day before. You keep breathing in and out. Things fall apart; you clean up the mess. And it all washes away in the night, to be built up again in the morning. You keep throwing the week against the wall to see what sticks, hoping you’ll remember something that happened today. Anything.

You begin to question how you’re spending your life, wondering if you’re wasting it. Spending so much energy just pushing back against the current, trying to keep your small boat afloat. Waiting for those singular moments that’ll make it all worthwhile, when you can finally say, “Eureka! I’ve found it!” But the rest of life is happening anyway, whether you’ll remember it or not. So you might as well say, “Olēka! I’ve lost it!” As if to mark the passage of yet another morsel of life, flushed down the hourglass. A final toast to the endless forgotten days, whose humble labor has given you ...

harke n. a painful memory that you look back upon with unexpected fondness, even though you remember having dreaded it at the time; a tough experience that has since been overridden by the pride of having endured it, the camaraderie of those you shared it with, or the satisfaction of having a good story to tell.

énouement n. the bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, finally learning the answers to how things turned out but being unable to tell your past self. French énouer, to pluck defective bits from a stretch of cloth + dénouement, the final part of a story, in which all the threads of the plot are drawn together and everything is explained. Pronounced “ey-noo-mahn.”

craxis n. the unease of knowing how quickly your circumstances could change on you—that no matter how carefully you shape your life into what you want it to be, the whole thing could be overturned in an instant, with little more than a single word, a single step, a phone call out of the blue, and by the end of next week you might already be looking back on this morning as if it were a million years ago, a poignant last hurrah of normal life. Latin crāstinō diē, tomorrow + praxis, the process of turning theory into reality. Pronounced “krak-sis.”

nemotia n. the fear that you’re utterly powerless to change the world around you, looking on helplessly at so many intractable problems out there—slums that sprawl from horizon to horizon, daily headlines of an unstoppable civil war, a slick of air pollution blanketing the skyline—which makes the act of trying to live your own life feel grotesque and self-indulgent, as if you’re rubbernecking through the world. Slovenian nemočen, powerless. Pronounced “nih-moh-shah.”

achenia n. the maddening sense that the world is too complex to even begin to understand, that whenever you try to answer even the most trivial question, it quickly tangles into a thicket of complications and melts into a quicksand of nuance, leaving you flailing for something solid to hold on to, struggling to come up with anything you could say that is definitively 100 percent true.

angosis n. the malaise that results from having unlimited access to something, which only seems to drain away its value—a cheat code that ruins the game, a camera that holds a million random snapshots, or having so much free time that all your goals dissolve in it.

Surely there’s some adult somewhere, keeping an eye on things.

TIRIS the bittersweet awareness that all things must end

You begin to wonder: Why bother making long-term plans? What’s the point of getting invested, when the sitcom will only get canceled, the house will break apart, the sand mandala swept into the trash? Why let yourself fall in love with someone when the best-case scenario is you’ll end up losing them?

Alas, even the world is not long for this world, soon to be swallowed up by the sun. Soon enough the stars will burn out, too, leaving little else but an echo of radiation, reverberating in a heatless void. And there will be no way to tell that time is passing at all.

“Our songs will all be silenced,” said Orson Welles, “but what of it? Go on singing.” Pronounced “teer-uhs.”

Whenever life feels chaotic and uncertain and everything runs together, words offer us a sense of clarity and definition, with clean lines that separate one thing from another. You may not know who you are or what will happen tomorrow, but at least you know the difference between magma and lava, a strait and a fjord, a thrush and a shrike. Just the act of putting something into words can give you the impression that everything is under control.

Despite what dictionaries would have us believe, this world is still mostly undefined.

A word is like the thread that leads out of the labyrinth. It’s not much—it’s so thin it’s barely there—but it’s enough to remind you of things you already know, so you can retrace your steps when you’re lost in the dark. To leap into the depths is a kind of joy. To chase an impossible dream is a joy. To feel anything at all is a joy.

For some reason, I find it a much easier task to define grief than to express gratitude, though the two emotions feel so similar they might well be synonyms, or two sides of the same coin—you can’t mourn something you’ve lost without celebrating the rarity of its presence in your life.

Over time I began to get a sense of how much we all must secretly have in common. How many of us must be burdened by the same unanswerable questions, muttering the same thoughts to the steering wheel or the shower wall.

That’s the magic of expressing how you feel, as precisely as you can. If nothing else, it can serve as a powerful reminder to all of us that we’re not alone.