The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

by John Koenig

waldosia n. a condition in which you keep scanning faces in a crowd looking for a specific person who would have no reason to be there, as if your brain is checking to see whether they’re still in your life, subconsciously patting its emotional pockets before it leaves for the day.

immerensis n. the maddening inability to understand the reasons why someone loves you—almost as if you’re selling them a used car that you know has a ton of problems and requires daily tinkering just to get it to run normally, but no matter how much you try to warn them, they seem all the more eager to hop behind the wheel and see where this puppy can go.

lackout n. the sudden awareness that you’re finally over someone, noticing that the same voice that once triggered a cocktail of emotions now evokes nothing at all—as if your brain had returned the last box of their things and your heart had quietly changed its locks.

ecstatic shock n. a surge of energy upon catching a glance from someone you like, which scrambles your ungrounded circuits and tempts you to chase after that feeling with a kite and a key.

etherness n. the wistful feeling of looking around a gathering of loved ones, all too aware that even though the room is filled with warmth and laughter now, it won’t always be this way—that the coming years will steadily break people away into their own families, or see them pass away one by one, until there comes a time when you’ll look back and try to imagine what it felt like to have everyone together in the same place.

soufrise n. the maddening thrill of an ambiguous flirtation, which quivers in tension halfway between platonic and romantic—maybe, but no, but maybe—leaving you guessing what’s going on inside their chest, forced to assume that at any given moment their attraction is both alive and dead at the same time.

dorgone adj. wondering if you could slip away from an event or group conversation without anyone noticing your absence.

antiophobia n. a fear you sometimes experience while leaving a loved one, wondering if this will turn out to be the last time you’ll ever see them, and whatever slapdash good-bye you toss their way might have to serve as your final farewell.

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,

ludiosis n. the sense that you’re just making it up as you go along—knowing that if someone asked why you do most things, you couldn’t really come up with a convincing explanation.

kuebiko n. a state of exhaustion inspired by senseless tragedies and acts of violence, which force you to abruptly revise your expectations of what can happen in this world, trying to prop yourself up like an old scarecrow, who’s bursting at the seams yet powerless to do anything but stand there and watch.

lockheartedness n. the atmosphere of camaraderie when people are stuck together in a certain place—a stalled elevator, a shelter during a storm, the sleeper car of a train—which leaves them no other option but to be present with each other, with nowhere else to go, and nobody else to be.

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.

SOCHA the hidden vulnerability of others There’s an optical illusion that’s easy to fall for, even if you know the trick: the more distant you are from other people, the more invulnerable they appear. You see yourself as you are, with your failures just as clear as your successes. But you see most other people on their terms—only from the side they want you to see, like a statue on a high pedestal, stoic and confident. At first glance, they’ve got everything figured out, with every feature set in stone, exactly as they had intended. They appear securely embedded in their community, wrapped up tightly with their loved ones. Their life seems complete, like a finished work of art. But it’s only just a trick of perspective, because you can’t see the cracks from so far away. You have no way of knowing how insecure their footing might be, how malleable they really are. How many years of effort might’ve gone into shaping their persona into something acceptable.

hemeisis n. the off-putting awareness of how deeply your culture’s norms are ingrained in your psyche—arbitrarily defining what you find shameful and admirable, private and communal, attractive and repulsive, fair and unfair—as if you’d been programmed in a way that you can’t control or even perceive, until you happen to encounter someone who has slightly different code.

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.

austice n. a wistful omen of the first sign of autumn—a subtle coolness in the shadows, a rustling of dead leaves abandoned on the sidewalk, or a long skein of geese sweeping over your head like the second hand of a clock.

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.

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.

KENOPSIA the eeriness of places left behind

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.

DÈS VU the awareness that this moment will become a memory

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.

galagog n. the state of being simultaneously entranced and unsettled by the vastness of the cosmos, which makes your deepest concerns feel laughably quaint, yet vanishingly rare.

aimonomia n. the fear that learning the name of something—a bird, a constellation, an attractive stranger—will somehow ruin it, inadvertently transforming a lucky discovery into a conceptual husk pinned in a glass case, leaving one less mystery fluttering around in the universe.

furosha n. the eerie tranquility of fast-moving clouds, who pass through your patch of sky like a drifter stepping into your entryway to warm up for a minute, ruffling the ice from his beard before he nods his gratitude and turns back into the air.