Sonder

The following is a poem inspired by the dictionary of obscure sorrows, which seeks to define newly invented words for powerful emotions, filling the hole that can be found the English language.

Sonder #

Sometimes I forget that you are alive,
That you live a life vivid and real in which you strive,
To succeed, to flourish, to love,
You too a snowflake that came down from above.

Sometimes I forget that you go on when we part,
That your existence does not begin with me at its start,
That you like I toil and sweat in the day,
That you like I have a family for which you would fight and pray.

Sometimes I forget our time together is fleeting,
That we are two souls on the journey of life who just happen to be meeting,
Though kindred our transient love we will not regret,
For in time that too we shall both forget.

Today I remembered why I long to forget,
Without you at my side my life loses colour and yet,
While the weeks, months, years, go by the same.
I live in sonder and it leaves me in pain.

Sonder n. the realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness — an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.