This is an example of a lexical gap, or lacuna between languages, in which there is no neat one-to-one translation from source language to target language. It never fails to make me conscious of the limits of (the English) language itself, and words in general. I can’t help but wonder just how many physical, emotional, and psychological phenomena remain non-existent or unknown to us only because language has not found the right words to adequately circumscribe and name them.

Anyway, this saudade seems to be a symptom of losing someone to some kind of uncertainty or non-closure. It’s like someone tells you (s)he’s going out to get some groceries, but (s)he never returns; and so you wait by that open door everyday, with an intermixed sentiment of hopeful vigilance and dire resignation. And somehow this intolerable complex of emotions can never, ever be resolved because the time and place for resolution has come and passed away. But still, there is a sliver of possibility - it’s just that the contrary, impossibility, is so overwhelming that this possibility is sublimated into a kind of fantasy or fixation. Sometimes it’s so difficult to tell whether there truly is still a chance of return, of reprisal; or if we merely miss something so much to the point of constructing an enduring imaginary ideal in its absence. Thus we phase in and out of self-conjured fictions and brutal reality, like the ghosts of shipwrecked mariners who have missed Charon’s vessel, wishing always to go home, but all the while knowing that the only home now is anywhere but home.

Somehow I think, this is going to last for always.

(Source: danithedin0sauraur)