Arcadia

83

There’s a beautiful word in our language: ‘monkharap’. Some say it’s one of those words that can never be translated, like nothing can ever be translated without something getting lost. I still try: sorrow, unhappiness, despondency, desolation, heartache comes close, melancholy comes closer. Close, but not enough.

What is lost? Perhaps the precise cultural connotations that go behind a language that would lose its meaning elsewhere, for we as the broken half of a country that was once whole relish our sadness when it comes. Or I am what is lost, perhaps. I, and the reasons, and non-reasons, for my unhappiness, the boy who broke my heart, the pattern that the letters of his name make, the picture of us that I have from a happier day, all that is lost, all that is not, the oceans, the questions, everything I have and haven’t been and everything I could or could not be. And the shadows. And the silence, too.

A word is a universe in it’s own. A word only belongs to the one who uses it. My monkharap is my own, and that is when I love it best, for I, too, born in the broken half of a once-whole country have grown to relish unhappiness when it comes. But is loving a word enough? Is this, close enough?