W hat marvels do the languages we’ll never know contain, what things would they tell us about ourselves if only we knew how to decipher them? Sometimes there are feelings I have that calcify inside me until, years later, a comet of words will set them free like a kiss in a fairytale. What if the words that will give me back to myself are ones I will not even understand?
Those lists of beautiful and supposedly untranslatable words are like too many macaroons at once. I’m not sure such delicate turns of phrase are meant to be gorged that way, instead of being savoured. I encountered one of them, unaccompanied, the other day — and perhaps because it was alone, among lines and not in lists, it arrested me. I mused over it slowly. This was the phrase, from the Japanese language: koi no yokan. The presentiment upon meeting someone that, eventually, you will fall in love with them. But not yet.
The last time I had that sense, I had held on to the possibility like the fact of the moon: full in rarer moments, obscured in most. Sometimes the probability of love took me far, literally. Sometimes I forgot about it. Once or twice, it ambushed me, and I would find myself bawling, as though a claypot I didn’t know was in my hands was suddenly in shards on the floor. All in all, let me say this: what was never promised but expected to be eventual was more inspiring than disappointing. Perhaps some glimpses of love yet to come, intuitions that hold true for only as long as morning dew on a leaf, are meant only to do that much.
The last time I really loved someone, I didn’t have a clue that it would come to pass for the year and a half in which I had known him peripherally, before he suddenly came into view like an aperture of sight or imagination had been adjusted. I never saw it coming, and sifting through memory later, I was humbled by the intricacy of life’s convolutions, how something only a short distance away had never shimmered at me with sweet allusion, or cast its spectral foreshadow.
Although here’s what I suspect and may never be told the truth about: he knew before I did. He’d had that presentiment, and if he had known the Japanese words, he may have known what to call it.
There are other words now to fill the gap that cannot be bridged. I know some of them. Others hover outside my comprehension.
Mulling over koi no yokan, I remembered that where that early recognition had caused me pain had actually always been only in platonic friendships. Their loss scars me far deeper than amorous disillusionment. I’ve matured into a tendency to see romance as transient in ways that I refuse to presume, even now, of friendship. I spent all of this year recovering from two friendships that failed my faith in them.
Again, and always, another Japanese word: kintsugi. The art of fixing what’s broken with gold, which hides neither its beauty nor the reason for its need.
(The Chennai-based author writes poetry, fiction and more)