there is no word for this

The English language has a lot of gaps for a language spoken by 1.5 billion people. There are a big ol’ bunch of sensations that we don’t have proper words for, so other languages fill them in.

The Danish have hygge — the coziness of candlelight and wool socks and not being asked to socialize. The Japanese have wabi-sabi, an entire philosophy built around finding beauty in imperfection, which is how I would describe my current living room situation. The Norwegians have forelsket — that dizzy, cannot-eat, cannot-think, walking-into-traffic feeling of falling in love for the first time, which English flattens into “having a crush,” a phrase that also describes how I feel about a good breakfast sandwich.

And yet for the single most disorienting, body-altering, identity-replacing feeling a person can have — the one that hits the second they hand you a six-pound stranger in a hospital room — English has nothing. We have “love,” a word doing so much unpaid overtime it also has to cover pizza, an outfit, the Six Feet Under finale, and my situationship from 2014. We use the exact same word for a cute sweater and for the human you would trade your own organs for without a beat of hesitation. That’s a mega system failure.

My mom used to say it to me constantly, the way I assume most mothers do: “You have no idea how much I love you.” And I, an insufferable and extremely confident child, would say, “Yes I do. Because I love you that much.” I was certain we were talking about the same thing. I was matching her, pound for pound, feeling for feeling. I was wrong, and she knew it, and she let me be wrong for thirty-six more years, because there was genuinely no way to explain that love to me until I felt it for my own son.

There still isn’t a word for it. So instead, here are some inadequate, overly specific, occasionally deranged descriptions of a feeling English simply refuses to name.

• Swallowing warm cotton candy and feeling it progressively expand in your chest until it’s pressing against your ribs from the inside.

• A vice grip slowly crushing your vital organs, but the vice grip was designed by Lisa Frank.

• The exact moment a wave picks you up off your feet at the beach.

• Being in the honeymoon phase of a relationship, minus the anxiety about whether he texts back, plus the anxiety about whether he ate a vegetable today.

• Your ribcage filling up like a lung after being underwater too long and then first full, desperate, grateful breath, except it doesn't stop at full. It keeps going.

• The moment right before you sneeze — that electric almost-something — and then it never actually resolves and it becomes your baseline.

• Your fear response and your joy response merging and becoming one signal, so that watching him do literally anything — walk, eat a grape, exist — now registers as this might kill me (good).

• Standing too close to a bonfire. The wall of heat that hits your whole front side at once, and instead of stepping back, you lean in.

• The syrupy last ten seconds of a hot shower before the water goes cold.

• Getting a genuinely good compliment from someone whose opinion you respect — except it's just him yelling "MAMA LOOK AT MY AIRPLANE" before showing you his favorite airplane for the four hundredth time.

• The sun coming through a window and landing directly on you.

• Sinking into a bean bag chair that's exactly your body temperature.

• Watching wax melt down the side of a candle and it just keeps moving, finding every groove, filling in everything.

• Being submerged in a very warm jacuzzi of jello.

• The weird ache of a limb that’s fallen asleep, right as the blood rushes back in — the pins-and-needles flood, except it’s your whole chest, and it never stops tingling.

• A yawn that never quite finishes — a full-body stretch and shudder, pleasant and involuntary, then it resets and starts again every time he says your name.

• Biting into a too-hot piece of pizza and burning the roof of your mouth — the sting where pain and pleasure are the same nerve ending for a second and you wouldn’t think twice before taking another bite.

• The weightless drop in your stomach on a rollercoaster, but it’s permanent, and you’re not on a rollercoaster, you’re just standing in the kitchen watching him try to stack blocks.

• Discovering your new favorite song and playing it on repeat until everyone around you is sick of it, except the song is a two-year-old badly singing "Baby Beluga" and you will never, ever be sick of it.

• Carbonation. Like your bloodstream got switched out for club soda.

• The pressure of a weighted blanket, but on your sternum specifically, and it followed you out of bed and now just lives there.

• Static on an old TV, but it radiates heat and an all-over buzz of white noise that somehow feels like being snuggled.

• Your oxygen got swapped for helium — you're two pounds lighter than you should be, at all times, for no reason anyone can see.

• The vertigo of standing up too fast — that half-second blackout — except it happens every time you watch him sleep for “just one more minute” before leaving the room.

• Melting ice in a warm hand — cold turning to water turning to nothing, except it’s the opposite, it’s something forming out of nothing and pooling somewhere just under your ribs.

I don’t know who’s in charge of creating new words for the English language, but they’ve clearly never tried to describe watching a toddler eat a popsicle for the first time, so I’ve taken the liberty myself. Someone had to sit down one day and decide that “hygge” meant something specific, that “forelsket” deserved to be a real word and not just a feeling people were having anyway with no name for it. So, in that proud tradition, please welcome to the English language:

Blornish. Klindschting. Doffelbump. Thurng. Vöm. Guddlethorn. Snurgle. Blurtch. Poddlewhack. Prundle. Hessenflit. Grimswaddle. Wobbeltuck. Skronkle. Flurmish.

I don’t know which one means what yet. I don’t think it matters. Say them out loud a few times. One of them is going to feel right.

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