The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

n. an emotion you haven’t felt in years that you might have forgotten about completely if your emotional playlist hadn’t been left on shuffle—a feeling whose opening riff tugs on all your other neurons like a dog on a leash waiting for you to open the door.

n. the eerie tranquillity of fast-moving clouds, who pass through your patch of sky like a wind-weary drifter stepping into your entryway to warm up for a minute, ruffling the ice from his beard before he nods his gratitude, closes his ragged coat and youthful eyes and turns back into the air.

n. the act of deciding whether to give a departing acquaintance a hug or a handshake, calculated by measuring your relative orbits, how long it takes your signals to bounce back, and the proximity of a close friend who just gave them a hug, whose massive gravitational force could slingshot you into a long-distance wave.

n. the satisfaction of lists, a series of bullet points being fired into the air as if to celebrate victory against the complexity of a universe that bombards us with five exabytes of data that would paralyze us if we didn’t connect random dots into constellations of dippers, hunters, and sexy ways to please your man.

n. the frustration of always having to spell out your last name, which is a garbled and timeworn souvenir left over from a medieval craze where people started identifying their status by flaunting their hometown, occupation or appearance, which was rendered obsolete by the invention of the Facebook profile.

n. the habit of forgetting how important someone is to you until you see them again in person, making you wish your day would begin with a “previously on” recap of your life’s various plot arcs, and end with “to be continued…” after those will-they-won’t-they cliffhanger episodes that air just before the show goes back into months of repeats.

n. the insomnia-borne jolt of awareness that you will die, that these passing years aren’t just scenes from a dress rehearsal, rounds of an ongoing game or chapters in a story you’ll be telling later, but are footprints being lapped by the steadily gathering tide of an unfathomable abyss, which still wouldn’t wash out the aftertaste of all those baskets of Buffalo wings you devoured just before bedtime.