The trouble is scale. We work with a finite stock of words, a narrow slice of colour, a limited range of sound. Feeling doesn't stay inside any of those borders. It is boundless in a way language was never built to match, which means every attempt to express it is really an attempt to fit something enormous through a doorway sized for something much smaller.
Most days, this hardly matters. Ordinary conversation runs on a fairly shallow register, and a narrow vocabulary is more than enough to order coffee, arrange a meeting, or ask someone how their weekend went. Language earns its keep in the practical business of getting through a day with a minimum of friction.
It is only when the subject turns toward something larger that the doorway starts to look too small for what is trying to get through it. Sometimes larger means something no doorway was ever going to fit.
A woman gave birth at twenty-four weeks, sixteen weeks before her daughter was due. The child did not survive. She is buried now on a hill above a small harbour, the water visible from where she rests. Thirty years have passed since that day. The feeling has not thinned with time so much as it has found somewhere quiet to live alongside everything else, and in three decades there has never been a sentence, or an hour of talking, that came close to holding the whole of it. Some things are hard to describe because the right words haven't been found yet. Others are hard to describe because no arrangement of words was ever going to be large enough to hold them. This was the second kind.
Not every oversized feeling arrives with that much weight. Take gratitude as an example. Not the polite kind offered out of habit, but the kind that arrives uninvited, years later, when a particular gift from a particular birthday resurfaces out of nowhere and the feeling turns out to still be fully intact. Try describing that feeling directly, without borrowing a story to carry it, and the words tend to arrive late, or thin, or slightly beside the point.
Yet the feeling does not need translating to be real. Held for a moment without being forced into a sentence, gratitude like this tends to leave something behind anyway, a kind of clearing, briefly, in whatever the day had been crowding in with. Not because the feeling was explained. Because it was simply let stand.
The same is true of the harder feeling, only more so. It was never going to be resolved by finding better words for it, and it was never going to be lessened by staying silent about it either. It simply had to be carried, unfinished, for as long as carrying it turned out to take. Thirty years, in this case, and probably longer.
Perhaps that is closer to what balance actually means here. Not resolving the mismatch between what we feel and what we can say about it, but learning to let the two sit side by side without expecting one to fully translate the other. The body carries what it carries. Language does what it can. Every so often, in the gap between them, something gets through anyway, not perfectly, but enough.