Feelings Without a Name

Sometimes I meet people whose existence fascinates me so much that I can hardly comprehend it. It’s not like I’m overwhelmed with love, hate, or pity. Because the affection I feel for the person doesn’t fit into the emotional template into which I’ve squeezed all 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. And it’s not pity because any supposed fragility I see in the other is merely a reflection of my own inadequacies. But I want to know everything about the girl. Even the smallest banalities become significant, important, and even overrated.

Maybe she’s just a normal girl who wants to cope with herself and the chaotic world around her and has enough to do with that alone, and I just imagine being just a little bit infatuated with her and her secrets, because I can thereby ignore the complexity of my own life for a short time. I can only receive the happiness of myself when I have found out how the other person defines happiness. After all, reality will be able to wait that long for me. I rack my brain over the question which emotion I feel now. If I could think of a name for it, it would be easier to find a way to deal with it, to put it aside, to cope with it.

The feeling without a name is too strong to ignore but too weak to deal with it. The worst thing about it is that I may have no right to it. I’m nothing more than some random guy in the background. Maybe it doesn’t even make sense to find a meaning for it. Because it can disappear as quickly as it came. Soon the girl has moved on again. On to new scenes, people, and stories. While I linger in the backdrop that has just been abandoned by the spotlight and is about to dissolve, gazing after the once so disarmingly smiling silhouette, only to have forgotten shortly afterward that the feeling without a name ever existed.