The Word for the Feeling

Maya found the box because she was looking for tape.

Her grandmother's apartment was full of boxes with the wrong things in them. The one marked SHOES had photographs. The one marked TAXES had a recorder and a bag of buttons. The one Maya opened was marked nothing at all, and it had letters, hundreds of them, in three different alphabets.

"Those are from everywhere I ever lived," her grandmother said from the kitchen, not turning around. "Portuguese on top. Then Greek. Then the ones from your great-aunt, which are in something close to Russian."

Maya pulled out a Portuguese one. She could read almost none of it, but one word kept coming back, underlined twice, like it mattered. Saudade.

"What's this one?"

Her grandmother dried her hands and came to look. She held the letter a long time.

"Saudade," she said. "It's. Hm." She frowned. "It's missing something. But warmly. Missing something you loved and might never get back, but the missing itself feels almost good. Sweet and sad at the same time."

"That's two feelings," Maya said.

"No. In Portuguese it's one."

Maya sat back on her heels. She had a list in her head of things that did not make sense yet, and she added this one. One word for two feelings. Or maybe one feeling that English just did not have a box for.

She tried to feel it on purpose. She thought about her old apartment, the one with the squeaky third stair, the one they moved out of two years ago. Missing it. Missing it warmly. She waited for it to feel like one thing instead of two.

It didn't. It felt like missing, plus a little ache, two things sitting next to each other.

"I can't make it be one feeling," she said.

"Of course not," her grandmother said. "You didn't grow up with the word. I did. For me it arrives already finished, like a egg. For you it's still flour and sugar in two different bowls."

Maya looked up sharply. That was a strange thing to say, and strange things were usually true in some way she hadn't caught yet.

She picked up a Greek letter. "What about these?"

Her grandmother scanned it. She tapped a word. "This. There's no English for this. It's like, the comfortable warm sleepiness you feel from being content. Not just tired. The good heavy feeling after people you love have fed you too much."

"We don't have a word for that?"

"You have the feeling. You don't have the word. So you don't notice it as its own thing. It just blurs into being tired."

Maya stood up. She walked to the window because she needed to move while she thought.

Down in the street, a man was waiting for a bus. He looked at his watch. He looked annoyed, or maybe worried, or maybe both, or maybe something in between that she didn't have a name for and so couldn't see clearly. She was suddenly not sure she could read his face at all. She had always thought feelings were just there, like the bones in your hand, the same set for everybody. Happy. Sad. Angry. Scared. The basic kit.

But if her grandmother's brain had a word that bundled missing-and-sweetness into one finished egg, and Maya's brain kept them in two bowls, then they were not feeling the same thing when they looked at the same letter. The letter made one feeling in one head and two in another.

The feelings weren't the bones. The words were doing something to the feelings. Or the feelings were partly made of the words.

"Gran," she said slowly. "When you read saudade. Does your heart do something mine doesn't?"

Her grandmother considered this with the seriousness Maya needed and almost never got from adults.

"I think," she said, "my whole body knows where to put it. Like a house with a room ready. You're reading it in a hallway."

Maya came back and sat down in the letters. She tried it once more. Saudade. The old apartment, the squeaky stair. And this time she didn't try to force the two bowls into one egg. She just let the missing and the sweetness sit next to each other and noticed that they were sitting there, two real things, in a hallway with no room built yet.

And that was a feeling too. The noticing of it. There was no word for that either.

"How many are there," she said. It wasn't quite a question. "Feelings with no English word. Feelings I'm having right now and can't see because nobody handed me the box."

"Hundreds, probably," her grandmother said, almost cheerful about it. "Every language carves it different. The Germans have a word for the loneliness of the woods. The Japanese have one for leaves coming through light. We think we all feel the same things. We feel whatever our people built rooms for."

Maya picked up the third kind of letter, the ones close to Russian, the ones from a great-aunt she had never met. She couldn't read a single word. Whole feelings were in there, finished eggs, and she had no rooms for any of them.

She was holding a box of feelings she could not feel.

That should have been frustrating. Instead it cracked something open. If feelings were partly built, then hers weren't finished. The man in the street finally got on his bus. Maya wondered what his grandmother's language would have called the look on his face. Whether somewhere there was a single word for waiting-and-watching-and-almost-giving-up that would let her see it all at once instead of in pieces.

"Teach me one," she said. "A whole one. The egg kind."

Her grandmother smiled and sat down in the letters with her, knees creaking, and pulled the Greek one back out.

Maya repeated the word after her. Wrong, then less wrong. She said it again, and again, building the room while her mouth was still learning the shape of the door.