I decided to scroll Pinterest for a minute while my pot of stew was cooking and there I found a prompt that said:
Invent a word for a feeling you’ve never been able to name
I thought for a while, doing something like a life recap before my brain could come up with my invention: the afterglow ache. This is a feeling that settles in after something good has passed. To me, it’s not grief, nor is it joy, but a bruise of both.
It mostly arrives uncalled for when laughter has faded from a room that was at a point filled with mirth, or nudges me when the sun has just stepped out of the sky and I’m up as a witness or when a visit ends and I offer to see my guest off, then on my way back, alone, the road stretches forward without witnesses.
Afterglow ache is knowing you were happy while the happiness was still happening, and realizing, almost at the same time, that it cannot stay. It is a certain heaviness in your chest when you smell a place you once belonged to. The softness that hurts when you come across old messages while rearranging your closet, then you recognize a version of yourself you no longer live inside.
It doesn’t require your tears nor does it give room to raise a voice, it simply just sits with you, asking nothing but a remembrance that is bittersweet.
Afterglow ache is proof that something mattered and you were present. That you loved without wasting the moment.
And it lingers, probably not to open a wound, but to whisper that whatever you were reliving was real, and you were there.
Xoxo
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