Bookmark #552

When someone tells me they cannot quite articulate their feelings, I tell them it is not uncommon, but I also tell them that it is a good thing. I long to experience things I cannot share and understand; I crave it. I love it when I see a sunset so beautiful, so destructively orange that it kills something inside me and births it anew, and then, when I try to tell someone about it, I do not have words that would do justice to what I felt. Then, I tell them it was gorgeous, but it wasn’t just gorgeous. A lone rose blooming on a fresh morning is gorgeous. There are more things in life beyond the visual aesthetic, and we often lack the words for them. A cup of coffee can be magnanimous when it saves you even without your asking. A table in a cafe with a heart and initials gorged into it is a better raconteur than most poets. It is not just old and wooden and brown. It is the story and the storyteller in one. The stolen nostalgia you feel when you sit in a cafe and come across a table like this cannot be expressed simply by describing it. It must be seen and felt.

We seldom find the words to tell these things and what they made us feel. I was speechless when I saw it. That is all we can come up with: speechlessness—the lack of words. It is the greatest level of human experience. Language, our ability to communicate, has brought us till here. Then, we go through life and suddenly lose all ability to say what we want to say or to write what we want to write. And then, we realise this is what it means to be living.

To be human is to regularly be at a loss for words.

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