The Unfinished Sentence

Every language has a word
for the things it cannot explain.

Except ours.

We have words for grief,
but not for the precise moment
a memory stops hurting.

We have words for love,
but not for the strange distance
between wanting someone
and knowing them.

We have words for time,
but nothing for the seconds
that seem to wait for us.

So we keep inventing sentences.

“I don't know how to say this.”

“It's difficult to explain.”

“Something feels different.”

And we leave the rest unfinished,
hoping another person
might recognise the silence
at the end.

I once met a linguist
who spent fifty years
trying to create a word
for an unnamed feeling.

He finally succeeded.

He wrote it on a sheet of paper,
folded it carefully,
and placed it inside a dictionary.

I asked what it meant.

He said,
“I don't know anymore.”

“Then why keep it?”

He looked at the paper.

“Because there was a time
when I knew exactly what it meant.
And I don't want to pretend
that time never existed.”

I asked him to tell me the word.

He shook his head.

“Some meanings disappear
the moment they are understood.”

Years later,
I found his dictionary.

The paper was still there.

But the word had faded.

Only its definition remained:

The feeling of having something
you cannot recover,
even when you cannot remember
what it was.

I read it twice.

Then I closed the dictionary.

There was something familiar
about the definition.

Something I almost remembered.
Something I still cannot name.