Saudade

There is a feeling that English splits into pieces. You might call part of it longing — a reaching toward something absent. You might call another part grief — the weight of something that is no longer there. And somewhere in the overlap, if the feeling carries any warmth at all, you might reach for "bittersweet" — something good and something painful held together in the same moment. But these words work by division. They separate the pleasure from the ache, the sweetness from the loss, the memory from the absence. They ask you to locate yourself somewhere on a spectrum, to say which part is larger. And in doing this, they miss something. There is a feeling in which the pleasure and the pain are not two things that happen to coexist. They are one thing. The pleasure is not despite the ache. The pleasure is made of the ache, and the ache is made of the pleasure, and you cannot get to one without moving through the other. English does not have a word for this. Portuguese does.