Something in us remains untranslatable.
When we are young and full of theories, nobody tells us that most of life will be based on incomplete information. We choose people before we fully know them. We stay with them while they become someone we didn’t choose. We love them through versions of themselves they haven’t met yet, and they do the same for us. The whole arrangement proceeds without guarantee, without footnotes, without so much as a terms-and-conditions page — which is either the most romantic or the most alarming thing about being human. Possibly both. Probably both.
Every person is an undiscoverable country, but not a quiet one. There are arguments in the kitchen, songs in the shower, stray daydreams stuck like receipts in pockets no one checks. We know one another only in glimpses, as if we were passing train windows at dusk: a lamp lit here, a shadow crossing there.
The universe itself seems to conspire with this partial knowing. It runs on laws older than our longing and refuses to show all its cards. In the smallest regions of reality, we can’t know exactly where something is and how it moves at the same time. To measure one truth is to blur another. Even at the smallest scales, knowledge comes with trade-offs; why should people be any different?
What if we could actually read each other’s minds?