my friend sees colors i'll never know.
she once described a sunset for twenty minutes with clinical precision. crimson bleeding into vermilion. that gold-green flash when light bends through atmosphere. the exact shade of indigo appearing for just three minutes as day surrenders to night.
i nodded along, seeing maybe half of what she described. her world contains colors mine doesn't. she sees distinctions my eyes smooth into sameness.
the inuit snow-words thing is messier than the internet version. language, morphology, dialects, translation problems. fine. the simple version still points at something real: people make more distinctions in the parts of the world they have to survive, love, or obsess over.
colors aren't the only thing some see more of. i watch people the way she watches light.
social settings reveal little weather systems.
you see pulltest at parties near kitchens, especially around 11 pm, when everyone is pretending to look for a drink. one person leans back a little and waits. if the other leans in, the conversation has permission to become smaller.
eyedance is the one i notice too often. a glance, a retreat, a second glance with plausible deniability. mutual interest, neither person willing to hold contact long enough to become responsible for it.
afterlook is simpler: watching someone walk away after the conversation technically ended.
hopewait is the suspended half-second after asking a question you badly want answered, before the other person's face has decided what it knows.
shockfreeze belongs to crowds. a glass breaks and the whole room stops mid-sentence. then everyone laughs too loudly and returns to being separate people.
five is enough. more than that and it starts sounding like a pitch deck for loneliness.
private vocabularies are useful only when they point back to life. otherwise they're collectibles.
my friend has her colors. i have whatever this is.
she is still better at sunsets.