Liegasm, Jealoushy, and Feminamity

Introducing 78 new emotions.

We updated Roger Hargreaves'southward Little Miss and Mr. Men universe as a suggestion to include some of our new emotions. Analogy: Zohar Lazar

We updated Roger Hargreaves's Little Miss and Mr. Men universe equally a suggestion to include some of our new emotions. Illustration: Zohar Lazar

We updated Roger Hargreaves's Little Miss and Mr. Men universe as a proposition to include some of our new emotions. Illustration: Zohar Lazar

This calendar week, the Cutting is exploring a scientific theory that suggests we have infinite emotions, and so long as nosotros can name them — and so we did, asking writers to place new ways to experience.

Contents: On Dear and Lust | On Joy and Contentment | On Anxiety and Dread | On the Internet | On Piece of work | On Other People | On Parenting

Perchance the sex poisoner is 20 years younger than you and took you abode to his basement apartment, where he sleeps on a bare mattress on the floor. Perhaps he spent the next morning telling you lot virtually his problems with his mother, Adderall, or existence expected to correctly pronounce "foreign" words. You remember that when y'all were gathering your dress you saw a copy of The Game slung on his pasty bedchamber floor, that he used the word gay as a term of corruption — just when you've been sexual practice poisoned, it doesn't matter. It's like you've been striking on the caput by a sexual hammer; you forget all the terrible things most his personality. You make excuses for his bad manners. Perhaps he was nervous, and that'due south why he said all that stuff well-nigh his "insane" ex-girlfriend'due south eating disorder? Maybe I simply need to lighten up! I hateful, I feel so close to him. As with food poisoning, your but recourse is to wait it out. Drink lots of h2o and stay abroad from whatever made yous sick. Don't think nigh him naked or touching you lot. Don't masturbate to thoughts of him or stalk him online trying to convince yourself that, really, he could exist okay. Be very careful about what yous swallow while poisoned — drugs and booze will only make it worse. —Alexa Tsoulis-Reay

Over the past few years I've been bewitched by flashes of dread when I end to consider all of the incredibly stupid means I could die. Crossing the street, eating leftover pizza, "challenging myself physically." It seems significant that the frequency of these thoughts has risen in my mid-30s, as I've fallen in beloved, married, and mapped out my life with my partner. The key tragedy of my death would no longer be the "loss of a bright futurity," but the end of my newly discovered satisfaction. At present, each time I tiptoe beyond a wet subway tile or sense a car passing as well closely to my bicycle, the shock of dread is almost always accompanied by gratitude. —James D. Walsh

Illustration: Zohar Lazar

You lot want to be them and y'all want to sleep with them. Like staring into the lord's day. The worst of all feelings. Peradventure the reason some murders are committed. —Edith Zimmerman

Something is alight. Alive. A tiny piece of me that was dormant a 2d agone is awake and alert. I was just sitting here reading Normal People, similar you—reading about Connell admiring Marianne's slender, milky-white cervix and her delicate clavicle as prominent and specific as "two hyphens"—and phwop! There it came, its estrus buzzing around inside me always then lightly, similar a free radical seeking an electron: needy, momentarily insistent. And, also like a gratis radical: so modest, so cursory. I could act on it. I could lean over to my married man, make a show of closing the laptop he'south staring at, initiate some common unbuttoning, offer him a spontaneous caress. Just then I'd take to put down this book, pull off this warm coating, remove some clothing. And what was once so ethereal would become and so … earthly. Is it even there anymore? I try to locate it more than specifically, knowing that every bit I exercise, it will dissolve. I turn the page. —Maggie Bullock

Your chest feels tight, you lot're brusque of breath, you can't perchance accept this feeling for another single second. Yous are bursting with love, looking at your kid, or domestic dog, or small expensive trinket — and it is too much. —Kelly Conaboy

Brought on by puppies, babies, Pikachu, the cherry pandas at the Prospect Park Zoo, and certain appealing raccoons. It'southward named, of course, for Lennie from Of Mice and Men, who ever loved too hard. —Izzy Grinspan

Analogy: Zohar Lazar

—Bryan Washington

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Analogy: Zohar Lazar

Moved a couch on your own somehow? Heartbreak adrenaline. Applied for and got ten dissimilar task offers? Hell, aye, you're sad, and information technology's giving you power. —East.Z.

Naz is a term from Pashto. It's a multifaceted term, which can mean something akin to "desiring affection" or "being in the mood for affection." But it can have a negative connotation. If you were to suddenly go silent precisely because you wished to exist wooed out of that silence (whether consciously or unconsciously) with endearments and tenderness, and so you might be doing naz. You want your silence, or your shyness, or fifty-fifty your anger, to be intuitively read every bit a desire for affection, without fifty-fifty necessarily knowing that that is what you are desiring, unless, of course, someone calls you out on information technology, which, if you lot live in an Afghan household, someone absolutely volition. —Jamil January Kochai

—Stella Bugbee

—E.Z.

—K.C.

—E.Z.

Illustration: Zohar Lazar

—East.Z.

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—Andrew Solomon

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Illustration: Zohar Lazar

You lot were wronged. The memory of the initial incident has worn shine. Now it's no longer a source of hurting or feet — it's something to pull out recreationally. The familiar contours feel expert. You lot know exactly which parts of the story make yous experience your moral superiority nearly acutely, which vistas from the high basis have the best view. Fondly yous rehearse the same plot points, imagine slight variations and hypotheticals, cherish the knowledge that the catastrophe will always be the aforementioned — it's y'all, now, irrefutably correct. Afterward, you lot feel a trivial gross. —Molly Fischer

Each July, a very small grouping of friends and I spend seven days together on a remote, miles-long pond in Maine. (I don't know why information technology's called a pond as opposed to a lake.) To get at that place, you drive about 2 hours on the highway, so some other hour on state roads, and so 20 minutes downwardly a clay logging road, and and so yous catch a boat to this place — an old Maine angling army camp, though none of us fish. At that place's no net and no jail cell service there. We stay in trivial cabins and spend our days on one of a series of tiny, uninhabited islands reached past canoe, sitting by the water in folding chairs, surrounded by tall copse, with not a sound effectually us — no airplanes overhead, no cars or fifty-fifty roads for miles. We are truly disconnected. We read books and play cards and start cocktail hour at 5 p.k. and slumber better than we practice all year long. Nobody has a telephone to bank check or an electronic mail to return for seven straight days. We've washed information technology for more than than xx years now, and every year — as the technological noise has increased — information technology'due south mattered more than and more to accept seven days of truthful silence and community with shut friends. (Fifty-fifty our teenagers love information technology. And each year we literally pray that nobody builds a jail cell tower on one of the surrounding mountains.)

Anyway, nearly this time of year exactly, all of us — each i of us a working professional, overburdened, maxed out, and thoroughly sick of winter — starts doing something we call "pearning." It's basically "yearning for the pond." It's trying to summon the feeling of taking a midday nap on your beach towel on the pino needles, just listening to the breeze in the trees and the loons calling on the pond. It'southward longing to be unreachable and fully present in exactly i identify in one specific moment. It's nearly the deepest and virtually specific grade of longing I know. —Sara Corbett

Illustration: Zohar Lazar

In Too Much Birthday, in the Berenstain Bears serial, published in 1986, Sister Deport gets a little too excited for her 6th-birthday party, arranges too many games, overindulges in cake, and writes an excessive guest list. By the time the party's in total swing, she totally flips out and starts inexplicably sobbing. She's having as well much birthday.

It's the sensation of feeling and then much joy at once that you almost feel alone. You tin't really enjoy the happiness surrounding you. Information technology's the reason one Irish good-byes from parties correct at their peak, and why playing with a new puppy for too long can somehow be agitating. Information technology's the sensation at the middle of that monologue from American Beauty virtually the plastic purse. "Sometimes there's then much … beauty in the world," Wes Bentley'due south creepy character, Ricky Fitts, mumbles. "I feel like I can't take information technology, and my center is just going to cave in." If I were Thora Birch in that scene, I would accept taken his hand in mine and felt his hurting deep downwardly in my soul. "Yeah, Ricky," I'd confess. "Sometimes I also have as well much birthday." —Annie Armstrong

The showtime time I experienced buralysis, I was, of course, at the Department of Motor Vehicles. I was trying to register my car in the new proper noun I had acquired upon wedlock in the new state to which I had moved to exist with my new husband. Every bit proof of my new name, I had: a spousal relationship document. What the agency would accept equally proof of my new proper name: a Social Security menu. What was on my Social Security card: my former name. The solution was simple: get to the Social Security function and get a new card in my new name. What I exercise instead: go back to my (new) apartment and lie down on the floor.

Bureaucracies are as awfully constructed every bit the First Lilliputian Piggy's firm but as sturdy as his more patient brother'south. The richest among us tin pay someone else to endure its indignities; the balance of us pay in time. Which is why indulging buralysis feels at starting time similar a kind of victory. Bureaucracies want your time; what better style, then, to tell them "Fuck y'all" than to deliberately waste it? Alas, once you've wasted your fourth dimension, the bureaucracy comes back around for your money. Eventually, I got up off the floor and mailed the Urban center of Cambridge, Massachusetts, $180 then I could have my maiden name back and savour the privilege of paying yet more than money to register a car under it. And the bureaucratic system, unruffled by my huffing and puffing, accepted my money and resignation both equally its due. —Miranda Popkey

Illustration: Zohar Lazar

—Sara Nović

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—Stella Bugbee

Illustration: Zohar Lazar

The agony isn't exactly the loss of a meal, but the loss of a promise of a plausible meal. You're mourning for a affair y'all could've had (an achievable matter!). Maybe y'all're flummoxed past the revamped American Chinese takeout bill of fare (too many options, all of them delicious), and y'all've chosen the lo mein, but the noodles haven't fifty-fifty hitting the table before you're daydreaming about 11 crab wontons. Maybe you're chewing charcuterie (meh) at the brilliant gay bar with 42 neon lights, when you'd rather be scarfing pork and kimchee at home. Perchance you're on a nutrition prescribed by your dr. (or yourself), and you're eating that salad, while the midday breakfast tacos are in the back of your mind, staring y'all down. This feeling circles the corridors of anxiety, but it isn't quite as bad. Which maybe makes it worse. —Byran Washington

Analogy: Zohar Lazar

—E.Z.

Analogy: Zohar Lazar

—S.B.

There is also an associated experience of being nitwhopped, which is the painful realisation that yous have just been the recipient of said multifariousness of preposterous lie. There is also a related noun, nitwhopper, denoting the teller of the lie. —Joanna Kavenna

—Genevieve Smith

—J.K.

My parents withal live in Northern California, near where I grew upwardly, and as the fires have become a normal part of their life, refreshing the emergency-services map has become a normal role of mine. This last season they evacuated and so, chased by the fume, were evacuated from their evacuation. I know what'southward coming for my home state. I feel cornered past history, and you lot can do ii things when you're pushed into a corner: scroll up and die or lash out. Anker comes from the ancient Greek ananke, which was the name for the primordial serpent goddess of necessity who croaky the egg of the world into beingness. Information technology's besides a political idea. The historian Thucydides used information technology for nations forced into war past threat of invasion or escalating rivalry. Anker when applied to climatic change is a way to talk about — and maybe better feel — the revolutionary urgency our ecological state of affairs requires of us, whether we like it or not. —Malcolm Harris

Analogy: Zohar Lazar

—Mark Epstein

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—Max Read

Watching TV, you lot are nauseated. Your team is losing or the election results are coming in. You're pissed off. You're more pissed off; yous're irate. Your jaw is clenched. Y'all want to scream. Just calm down, you tell yourself, information technology doesn't really affair who makes the playoffs. And fifty-fifty, I'll exist fine if America chooses its worst citizen to go president. It'll be abrasive, just information technology won't actually touch on anybody'due south life. You know, fifty-fifty as you're trying to convince yourself, that you're lying. Every clenched muscle fiber knows that these things matter, and as difficult as you try to unclench, your trunk is stronger than your brain's attempt to protect information technology. Yous are tense, holding tightly to your own delusions. —Brian Platzer

—J.D.Due west.

Or like that the whole affair you've congenital your life around is stacked on a faulty premise. The pea at the bottom of the quilts is in fact a lentil. Or only the queasy feeling that there will never be a "right." In that location volition always exist a worm wriggling in the corner. But what if it's … —E.Z.

—S.B.

Analogy: Zohar Lazar

—Greg Jackson

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Will you lot ever learn this lesson? Is it non a lesson? Is your disability to learn this one crucial life lesson — or your inability to make it stick — somehow the only role of y'all that is eternal and fixed? This disability to remember that your current mood won't terminal forever — is it, in fact, the matter that will concluding forever? Will it be the one gilded kernel at the bottom of the ash urn? —Due east.Z.

—Rafael Prieto

I almost lost Memphis several months ago. I'd rushed him to the brute infirmary when he awoke from a nap making a horrible screaming sound. In that location, I learned one of his vertebrae had shattered, and the sharp shards were poking into his spinal cord.

During the days Memphis was gone, the business firm had a different kind of quietness to information technology. He usually sleeps at my feet when I write, and in his absence I couldn't really write. My anxiety felt cold and exposed. I hadn't realized how tightly he was woven into the texture of my time. Every mean solar day around midnight I take him for a walk, and now I found myself pacing the sleeping accommodation floor instead. I felt dangerously floaty, disoriented, and pierced. It occurred to me that the leash I use is every bit much to tether me as it is him. I really took it out and wrapped one end of information technology around my wrist, gripping the nylon string in some kind of kinetic prayer. Don't let him die. Delight and not yet.

But if not yet, and so when? Who is ever gear up to let their canine go? In the end, most of us kill our pups. Nosotros tell the vet to inject the stuff that ends their lives. After that happens, you walk out into a world that is every bit empty as a dog dish once filled with bloody steak. Licked make clean and sparkling cruelly. —Lauren Slater

Illustration: Zohar Lazar

—Dayna Tortorici

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Verb: hupokringe, hupokringing, hupokringed.
Derivatives: adjective, breezy, hupokringeworthy. Slang, U.S., 21st C., noun-phrase the hupo-kays: The second I pressed send I got a bad case of the hupo-kays.
Origin: From Greek hupokrisis ("acting of a theatrical role; to play a part; to pretend); From hupo ("below; up from nether" + krinein "to decide, to pass judgment"); kringe, from the Heart English crenge, crenche, related to Old English language cringan, crincan; "to bend, yield, fall in battle," related to the German language krank ("sick; to experience an inward shiver of cocky-cloy or shame"). —Zadie Smith

You want to use it. It ought to be there. You swear you've seen it before — a preying mantis, a pickle, a tampon, anything that volition signify pilus. But no matter how carefully yous swipe through the card, no matter how many synonyms yous blazon in to activate the predictive emoji feature, you lot just can't observe it. It's the digital version, in both senses, of a give-and-take beingness on the tip of your tongue. —Namwali Serpell

Illustration: Zohar Lazar

—S.B.

—Eastward.Z.

Analogy: Zohar Lazar

Inside this moment, and part of Instagrief, is the sorrow of knowing—with a flash of intuition — that by the time you lot get the phone upwards and the camera on, the moment will be gone. This is the paradox that infuses a moment of Instagrief with existential dread and lends it a horrific, undignified desolation. At the same time, Instagrief — in that magical way of namable emotional states — acts as a reminder of time itself, the instability and fragility of particular moments (exterior social media) that once, years ago, were merely good moments worthy of recording just normally missed, left behind in the sepia backlog of old memories — wherever in the brain these images are cached — to be recalled, perhaps, upon your deathbed.

Derivations include, Instagratifiction, the please of accidentally catching an fifty-fifty better, funnier, more adorable or beautiful moment than predictable, and Instambivalence, the sensation — avoiding Instagrief — that you captured the moment or the scene but in doing and then annulled the true human value of experiencing the moment itself, while at the aforementioned fourth dimension feeling the total glory of knowing the image is immediately out there existence seen by the globe of Instagram. —David Means

It is a sudden awareness that you accept reentered material reality afterward a period of having been blacked out, or on autopilot, or somehow attentionally removed from the earthly airplane. The sensation combines unease, guilt, and mystification in equal quantities, non unlike waking upwardly from a nap you weren't supposed to take. Unbidden naps, still, are easier to recover from: We're constantly reminded in mundane means that we lack control over our bodies, but to concede that we also lack control over our minds is a creepier prospect. —Molly Young

Thoughts movement into a maw, a gullet of certainty that I don't know plenty virtually what I'grand supposed to write about next. Wanting to surrender. Hither. Now. Get in cease. Pangs move through the optics, then shoot into tear ducts, producing adrenalized dry-lightning strikes of uncertainty. No tears, wanting to weep. Why can't I cry? This weather system gathers into gloomy clouds of funk. Darkening. Distracted by this — even when I'm with others. Before long I tin't be with others. Into the tunnel once more.

Wanting to quit; agape to quit; wishing I were someone who could just alive without doing this, without needing to see out loud, get the attention, exist loved past strangers. Crumbling internal emotions turn into shale chipping away, collapsing now over the interior vents of pity. I'm closed off again from the earth, I think. Procrastinating; palpitations; bitterness; simulated thoughts; the failure flocking, ominous. —Jerry Saltz

Other inklings. A deeper divination of some futurity identify? A wilder shore? Rise-up emotions, attempts to read, take notes, Google an thought. Push further into the work. Stare out the window at the traffic. Drifting. Soon, something I didn't see coming produces small thought-warblings and nano-releases. A composing of anarchy, something that turns into something else. Outset in the mind, partly writing it downwardly on paper; rolling it around, feeling it'southward shape and sound; looking for linguistic communication, length, pace. Is it besides much? Not enough? Is it beautiful?

I know information technology'southward shut at present, very close. Pulse ascension with fear. Soon, a wriggling feeling. Maybe deluded grandeur, a quailing acuteness of confidence. Simply enough to open another Word document. A solar barge moves inside me. I submerge into a start line; anything, words in a row; continue typing. A spiraling gyre arrives. Something's here! I've charted this class, I think. I may know where I'm bound a fleck. How? That's besides big a question. Brand a beginning sentence declarative, give it a resounding whiff of where I want to go. Own something. Be vulnerable, strong just not obnoxious, open. Don't end. Snapping at any break, going every bit far from the shore of foulness as this showtime assailing of fears tin possibly take me until I no longer feel the ground beneath my feet, knowing I accept to swim now, make this happen. Temperature changing. Different motions of inner waters, ponderings, depths felt or suggested, bottom falling away in wonderful ways. Don't think nearly it. I am carnivorous to finish. —J.S.

Analogy: Zohar Lazar

A sinking feeling that no good outcome is possible. Irritation at your failure to correctly predict the outcome of your situation. Antonym: Wigi ("Wish I got involved"): The guilt of not speaking out when you know you should have. —Southward.B.

Impostor syndrome is the feeling of being unworthy of the life you lot've created; that your achievements were lucky breaks rather than hard-earned. Its changed is the particular kind of joy that comes from channeling another person; that feeling when you're faking it then well that you've even fooled yourself. It's the reason people take modify egos, why Beyoncé invented Sasha Tearing and David Bowie invented Ziggy Stardust.

I've tried to chase inverse-impostor syndrome with costumes and props, similar an old game of pretend, and accept found that when I'one thousand wearing a leather jacket, I go someone who feels less pressure level to smile at a bad joke. Only mostly, the feeling strikes when I don't expect it. Late at night during heavy conversations at confined with strangers I'll never come across again and, once or twice, while interviewing for a job for which I was decidedly unqualified and found myself breezily asking invasive questions well-nigh my interviewer's emotional country. I'm convinced it's the feeling that leads to beginner's luck; there's an easy confidence that comes with having nothing to lose. Inverse-impostor syndrome is a weird kind of high when something seems so impossible that all pressure dissipates and you both know you're faking information technology and feel utterly invincible. It's not the first step on a long path of self-improvement. It's the combination of a dead end and a groovy ride. —Jessica Weisberg

—E.Z.

Illustration: Zohar Lazar

—G.C.

—J.K.

For case: you walk offstage; you're fine. You're fine! You're fine. Only you tin can't tell if you're breathing comfortably, yet. Your heart rate all the same feels somehow unreliable. Y'all effort to participate in conversation and tin can't find the rhythm of normal speech. Y'all say things and they seem incorrectly calibrated, either likewise loud or also fast. But it's over! There's nada left to be nervous about. Knowing this merely makes you more than aware of your strangeness, which doesn't help with the normal speech. You lot pause to breathe, although you are already breathing. You're fine. Go take a drink. It'll pass. —M.F.

In a sentence: "When the job offering was rescinded, his family was heartbroken for him — just in truth, he'd been dreading the move to D.C. and felt zip merely ramo." —Eric Levitz

I credit my husband for identifying this awareness. My hubby credits his brother; his brother thought maybe he got the phrase from Conrad; it seems to have really come up from Heidegger. (He writes in his "Alphabetic character on Humanism" of "our scarcely conceivable, abysmal bodily kinship with the brute.") Abysmal kinship is what y'all feel when the dumbest person you follow on Twitter posts almost how much they're loving a book that you lot love also. Your pretensions are denied. "One of us," abysmal kinship says. This is how my husband felt attending a Grateful Dead comprehend-band concert in Brooklyn last year. (Jam-band fandom abounds in bottomless kinship.) He looked out on a crowd he described as "clean boys in Online Ceramics" and he knew — even if he wasn't wearing an $80 tie-dyed T-shirt — that he was among his kind. —Chiliad.F.

—Boris Kachka

—Melissa Fay Greene

Illustration: Zohar Lazar

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Onset is marked by the abrupt realization that you lot are, in fact, riddled with the mistake you lot've been calling someone else out for. This mental symptom (self-insight, humility) causes a slightly painful shortness of breath, like being startled, and speechlessness followed by a feeling of heat, typically described as "a fiery poker," which, after blossoming at the crown of one's head, slips downwardly and lodges in the lower abdomen, where information technology reportedly ripens into something sickish and also hella melty. (The hotness, oft mistaken for guilt or shame, is actually distinct when it occurs every bit an intermediary phase of feeling planked.) "Information technology'southward me —" yous all of a sudden think, "I'm the one who'due south been doing that." (Variations include: "I'one thousand too doing that." Or, "I'yard actually doing crap that is so much worse." Or, simply — and much more common — "I'm not perfect either.") A few moments later, however, you experience liberated, unsheathed, informal, and celery-fresh. This snowballing sense of rectitude is braided with unexpected euphoria: an feel, however delicate, of the knowledge that you are shot through with every other living and non-living affair. In a judgement: "That epiphany was harsh dude, only worth it — I'g at present super-planked." Traceable dorsum to a story in which a famous spiritual leader chastises a villager "You hypocrite," he allegedly says, "Mayhap lecture your neighbour well-nigh the speck in his eye after you have taken the enormous plank out of your own." —Harry Contrivance

Prevalent during family holidays and long motorcar journeys. —J.G.

Analogy: Zohar Lazar

—Jenny Tinghui Zhang

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—Thousand.R.

—E.Z.

—J.D.W.

Analogy: Zohar Lazar

—Nell Scovell

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—K.S.

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—E.Z.

All the things you lot shouldn't accept said and all the ways you probably looked foolish. Most often, this feeling descends the morning time after socializing but tin can, in rare instances, occur while still mid-chat, causing a temporary verbal paralysis and a slight awareness of disembodiment followed by a general feeling of panic. —Thousand.S.

—S.B.

—J.Thousand.

Illustration: Zohar Lazar

—S.B.

These second-generation friendships are frequently forced past parents, so when one genuinely blossoms, it creates a special kind of pride and joy. —N.S.

It'south bedtime for your 3-to-viii-year-old, and you're tired and hungry. You've read her ii books, rubbed her back, gotten her a Band-aid for her pretend injury, refilled her water, taken her to the bathroom, and practical lotion to her "itchy neck." At present she's asked you to tuck her in. Yous refuse. Which is odd, because you always constrict her in. Tucking her in is no big deal, especially afterward all that other stuff you've done in order to avert a blowup. Also, tucking her in is probably your favorite part of the day. Merely in a moment of parental frustration and random assertiveness, you've drawn an arbitrary blood-red line, and she looks at you lot, and you await at her, and you must decide whether to requite in or to stand your ground, and y'all can't let her think she tin can change your mind by whining after you've used your serious voice, so you don't budge. "No," yous say, "I won't tuck you in." She screams and cries and screams, and y'all caryatid yourself, knowing yous might never sleep or eat dinner once more. —B.P.

Illustration: Zohar Lazar

Produces a need to speak louder to your child and repent in advance, fake smiles, calorie-free sweats, and a want to flee, followed past indignant stress eating. —South.B.

The baby has been awake since 4 a.m. Y'all are tired beyond tired. Consciousness is a state y'all don't fully enter just never completely leave. Finally, after information technology feels similar she has been awake for a 1000 days, her optics autumn close, the nipple drops from her rima oris, and she goes soft. You lower her into the crib and magic trick of magic tricks, she does not wake. A shower, tea, the quiet, are waiting, but here is the surprise: Every bit the warm water runs over you, y'all miss her. In your robe, you stand above her curled form, her cheeks sleep-pink, and you lean down to smell her, the dew of babe sweat, her hands softer than when she is awake. Though you take waited all morning for her to sleep, now you want her back. You reach in and scoop her up and have her to the nursing chair, where your artillery will get numb, your neck will tighten, you will get no chores washed, no emails written, and you will heed to her breathe, watch a dream flutter across her eyelids, and regret nothing. —Ramona Ausubel

Your young child screaming "Daddy!," arms open for a big lift-hug. Your domestic dog barking, tail wagging, jumping upward to your chest with jubilation and lick-kisses. Your just-moved-in-together romantic partner light-headed to have you lot abode. What a matter. That you — complicated and moody — have found some other living being who could exist so excited about you! Hearing footsteps equally your key enters the lock makes your heart crush faster. You find yourself smiling. You feel lighter. Yous want to be exactly here at exactly this moment. —B.P.

Analogy: Zohar Lazar

—South.B.

*A version of this article appears in the Feb iii, 2020, issue ofNew York Magazine. Subscribe At present!

Introducing 78 New Emotions