Every feeling deserves a name

I think language is always borrowing. Stealing, really. From other tongues, other times, other needs. That is how words are born. Not because we invent new feelings, but because we finally admit they exist.

That is what these words do for me. They name things I have carried for a long time without knowing how to hold them.

Vellichor is the pull of layered time. The ache of familiarity without memory. The sense of arriving somewhere life has already happened and left a trace. Not a story. A residue. I feel it in old houses, empty rooms, late afternoons. It is not nostalgia. It is recognition.

Opalure is the longing to be seen without translation. To be understood as you understand yourself. Not improved. Not simplified. Just held in full clarity.

Relentique is the strange sadness of being surrounded and still unseen. A ghost with witnesses. Not loneliness, but invisibility in plain sight.

And only then does it matter where these words come from.

Most of them are not old. They only sound old. They are borrowed and stitched together from Latin, French, German, Japanese, English. Fragments of other languages, other times, other needs. They were created because someone, somewhere, felt something and realised there was no word for it yet. So they made one. That is how language evolves. Not in academies, but in the quiet space where feeling looks for a shape. Some of these words will disappear again. Some will stay small and secret. And some, like petrichor, will one day slip into everyday language because we finally admit we have always known them.

Novalensis is the moment you realise how fragile everything is and love it anyway. The gratitude that trembles because it knows it can be lost.

Lacrimaire is what music does when it opens something you did not know you were carrying. The ache without a story. The unravelling that happens quietly, headphones on, eyes closed, letting sound reach places language cannot.

And then there is Shirokuro. Black and white. The comfort and the violence of simplicity. The temptation to reduce. To decide. To make things clean. And the realisation that what matters lives in the grey. In the blur. In the unresolved. In the nuance that refuses to be flattened.

These words belong together. They describe the same inner landscape from different angles. A life lived with attention. With tenderness. With awareness. A life that notices before it explains.

Maybe I collect them because they grip me silently when I read them.

Maybe I write because I want to leave traces too. Then again, not maybe. It is a fact.

It is not loud. Not perfect. But true.

I hope that someone walks into a room of sentences I wrote one day and feels that strange pull.

And think:

oh.

so it wasn just me.