Feelings Without a Name
In the most unexpected situations, I encounter girls whose sheer existence fascinates me so much that I can hardly comprehend it. It’s not as if I’m overwhelmed by love, hate, or pity, because the tentative affection I feel for the girl on the other side doesn’t fit into the emotional templates into which I’ve almost instinctively pressed all my previous encounters.
It’s not love, because I’m not consumed by jealousy, desire, or grief. It’s not hate, because I finally feel a touch of empathy again. I’m happy when the girl is happy, and sad when the girl is sad. And it’s not pity, because any supposed fragility I see in the girl is merely a reflection of my own inadequacies.
The more interesting I find a girl, the more I naturally want to learn about her. Even the smallest banalities that no one else is aware of—perhaps not even the girl in the spotlight—become significant, important, even overrated.
What kind of music does she listen to? What clothes does she wear? How exactly did she become the collection of ideas, ideals, and identities that she is today? And what would I even do with the answers to these questions? The incomprehensibility of otherness can drive me mad if I’m not careful.
Not only can I find no definition for my own feelings, I can’t even manage to pigeonhole the girl into neat categories. Every encounter brings new insights, and I feel compelled to shatter the theories I carved in stone the day before.
Then the floor, littered with dust and debris, bears witness to the fact that the irrefutable knowledge of human nature—which I had been convinced of all these years—was worth about as much as the time I wasted trying to find answers to questions that may not even exist. After all, not even the girl in whom I suspect this enlightenment knows of its existence.
Perhaps I project too much onto the girl. Perhaps there’s nothing there. Perhaps she’s just a normal girl who simply wants to come to terms with herself and the world around her and already has enough to deal with.
Maybe I’m just imagining that I’m a little infatuated with her and her supposed secrets because it allows me to ignore the complexity of my own life for a short time. After all, I can only receive my own happiness once I’ve figured out how the girl defines happiness. Reality can wait for me until then.
I rack my brains trying to figure out exactly what feeling I’m experiencing. Because if I could come up with a name for it—a definition—it would be easier to find a way to deal with it, to put it behind me, to come to terms with it. I’m not even sure if what’s buzzing around in my head is a real feeling at all, or if it’s just my imagination because I have too much time to think again.
The feeling without a name is too strong to ignore but too weak to fully engage with. So I carry it around with me out of slowly creeping habit and wait almost anxiously for the moment when it knocks on the door of my chaotic world of thoughts again—usually when the mischievously smiling face that first led me down this strange path, in the truest sense of the word, enters the room.
But perhaps this gap in my own emotional spectrum is also sad proof that I’ve lived my life so far in a predetermined manner, in which even my feelings were copies of copies of copies—from television, from books, from the lies of society. Their names are rules—no, almost laws—for how I should behave when I stumble into one of these feelings.
Do I feel love? Then I despise the relationship the girl is in, burst with jealousy when she even looks at someone else, and cry alone at night, masturbating into my pillow, because I will never be part of her colorful world.
Do I feel hatred? Then I turn the girl’s life into a hell on earth, set fire to her pet, her family, and her entire apartment building, spin the threads of manipulation so skillfully that she ends up collapsing in the street, screaming, because life no longer has any meaning.
Do I feel pity? Then I turn myself into a more or less invisible guardian angel who will do anything to ensure that the victim of my favor never, ever suffers harm again—and I make sure to feel really good and great and important about myself while I’m doing it, because otherwise it all makes no sense.
In the end, it’s all about me and no one else. Just like always. What’s the point of helping someone else if I can’t reap the rewards? Exactly. The worst thing about this nameless feeling is that I may not even have a right to it.
After all, there are far more important people in the life of the girl I want to impose my worn-out template on. I’m nothing more than a fleeting minor character whose stage appearance is so brief that I’m not even explicitly mentioned in the script—at most, perhaps, as a passerby, spectator, or guy no. 5.
But perhaps this insight is enough to make peace with the nameless feeling. Maybe it makes no sense to find meaning in it, because it’s not permanent and can disappear as quickly as it came—at the latest when the girl whose accessible gaze triggered it in the first place has moved on.
On to new scenes, people, stories. While I myself linger in the backdrop that has just been abandoned by the spotlight and is about to dissolve, watching the silhouette that once smiled so disarmingly, only to forget shortly afterwards that the nameless feeling ever existed.