The Word She Didn't Have

The fight started over nothing, which is how Maya knew it was about something.

She and Soren were sitting with Hana, a girl from Japan who had arrived three days ago and still ate breakfast alone, arranging her rice and pickled vegetables with the kind of careful attention Maya recognized. The kind that meant you were paying more attention to everything than anyone had asked you to.

The fight was between two boys at the next table. One was from Brazil. One was from Norway. They'd been friends all week, and now they weren't, and the Norwegian boy, Erik, had come over and dropped onto the bench across from Soren with his tray and said, in careful English, that he did not understand what he had done wrong.

Maya had looked at him.

He didn't look angry. He didn't look sad. He looked like a word she didn't know.

"He said I was being saudade," Erik said. "Like it was an insult."

"What's saudade?" Soren asked.

"That's what I said. And then he got more upset."

Maya glanced at Hana, who had set down her fork.

"I know that feeling," Hana said quietly. "In Japanese we call it mono no aware. It is like," she paused, and her hands moved slightly, as if she were trying to hold the shape of something, "when you love something because it is going to end. When the ending is part of the love."

Erik stared at her. "That's a feeling?"

"Of course," Hana said.

Soren had his notebook out. Maya didn't say anything about the notebook. She was thinking.

"So his friend called him saudade," Maya said slowly, "and he meant it like, you love something that's leaving. And camp is ending Friday."

Erik went still.

"And you said what is that, like it wasn't real," Maya continued. "Like he'd made it up."

The stillness on Erik's face was a different shape now.

"I didn't know," he said.

"Neither did I," Maya said. "Until thirty seconds ago."

Soren had written saudade and mono no aware and put a question mark and then a longer question mark. He looked up. "Okay but wait. If those are real feelings, why don't we have words for them in English? Like, how are we feeling things right now that we don't have names for?"

Hana considered this seriously. "Maybe you feel them. But without the word, your brain doesn't know to keep them. They," she searched, "dissolve."

Maya felt something happen in her chest. She didn't have a name for it.

That night, she couldn't stop thinking about it. She went to find Soren on the dock after lights-out, because he was always on the dock after lights-out, and she sat next to him and said, "I looked it up."

"The words?"

"No. Why the words exist at all." She'd borrowed the camp counselor's phone for twenty minutes before dinner. The counselor, who was mostly interested in her own novel, had handed it over without looking up. "There's a scientist. Lisa Feldman Barrett. She says emotions aren't things that just happen to you. They're things your brain builds. Like, your brain gets all this data from your body, your heartbeat, your stomach, and it goes looking for a concept that fits. And whatever concept it has, from your language, your culture, everything you've been taught, that's what emotion it makes."

Soren was quiet for a moment. "So if you don't have the word."

"Your brain still gets the data. It still has to do something with it. It just," Maya paused. "It makes something blurrier. Something that doesn't quite fit."

Soren looked at the water. The moon was making a long stripe across the lake.

"So Hana feels things I can't feel," he said. "Because she has words I don't have."

"Maybe," Maya said. "Or maybe she feels the same raw thing and her brain cuts it a different way. Like, we all have the same clay. But we have different shapes to press it into."

"That's not more comforting," Soren said.

"No," Maya agreed.

They sat with that.

"So what's the feeling I'm having right now," Soren asked. "Because I don't have a word for it. It's like," he stopped. "It's like finding out your whole map is smaller than the territory."

Maya thought about the list she kept in her head. Things that don't make sense yet. She'd been keeping it for three years. She'd assumed that eventually, given enough time and enough facts, every item on the list would get resolved.

She had just added something to the list that she was not sure could be resolved.

Not the emotion words. Those could be learned.

The question underneath them.

"I don't know what to call what I'm feeling either," Maya said.

From somewhere back on shore, they heard two voices. Erik's and, unmistakably, the Brazilian boy's. They were arguing. Then they were not arguing. Then they were laughing, although not about anything that could be heard from the dock.

Soren turned a page in his notebook, found a blank one, and wrote something at the top. Maya leaned over to read it.

He had written: feelings I might have been having without knowing what they were.

Below it, he had left the rest of the page completely empty.

Maya reached over and tapped the blank space once with her finger, and then she didn't say anything, and neither did he, and the water made small sounds against the dock posts in the dark.