1. It arrived in an envelope with no return address, though the postmark was legible: Plovdiv, a city I have never visited, in a country I know only by its roses and its silences.
2. Inside: one index card. On it, in a hand I did not recognize, the word мъка. Nothing else. Not a translation. Not an explanation. Just the word, in blue ink, slightly pressured at the к as though the writer had paused there.
3. I have since learned that мъка does not translate. This is not the same as saying it has no meaning. It means something closer to grief-that-has-become-structural, to longing-after-the-fact. The dictionaries say: anguish. Torment. The dictionaries are wrong in the way that all translations are wrong, which is to say: accurate and insufficient.
4. There is a woman I imagine sent it. She is older, has outlasted several regimes and at least one language. She carried мъка for decades the way you carry a stone in your pocket — not because you chose to, but because one day it was simply there and you walked with it long enough that the weight became indistinguishable from posture. At some point she decided she was finished.
5. The envelope was addressed to me specifically. This is the part I cannot account for.
6. I tried returning it. I addressed an envelope to Plovdiv, to the street the postmark implied, and wrote on a fresh index card: I think this belongs to you. The envelope came back. The address, I was told, no longer corresponded to anything.
6.1 This is also how the word works. You try to send it back to its origin and the origin no longer exists. The grief has outlasted the thing that made it.
7. Мъка is not melancholy. Melancholy is northern, architectural — it has windows and a view. Мъка has no view. It is the room behind the room, the one that doesn't appear on the building's plans but that everyone in the building knows is there.
8. My neighbor, who is from nowhere near Bulgaria, asked what the card said. I told her it was a word. She asked what kind. I said: the kind that arrives after everything else has already happened. She nodded as though this were a known category of mail, which perhaps it is.
9. The word does not get lighter. I want to report that it does — that understanding a thing diminishes it — but this is not true of мъка. Learning what it means adds to it. Each definition is another layer. The anguish of the dictionaries stacked on top of the anguish of the word.
10. There is a question I return to: was this a gift? It arrived like a gift — chosen, addressed, sent with intention. It functions like a gift in that I did not have it before and now I do. But gifts are supposed to confer something on the receiver, and what I have received is a weight that previously belonged to someone else.
Unless that is exactly what she intended. Unless the gift was the weight.
11. For a while I believed the task was to keep it.
12. On a Tuesday, for no reason I can name, I took the index card from my desk. I crossed out мъка. Above it I wrote hiraeth — a Welsh word meaning the longing for something that may never have existed, or that existed and cannot be returned to. I do not know where I learned this. It had been in me for some time, apparently, waiting.
13. I addressed a fresh envelope: Човекът, Който Още Чака, Poste Restante, Plovdiv. The stamp glue tasted of saudade.
Then I walked to the postbox and let it go.
Whether it arrives is not my concern. Whether anyone receives it is not my concern. The weight was not mine originally and I have determined this is sufficient justification.
The index card is gone. The drawer is empty.
Мъка, as best I can tell, is now in transit.
J.M.C. Kane is the author of Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss About Neurodivergent Talent and How to See It. He is an ASD-1 and writes from this learned experience at the periphery of things. His prose work has been published in more than three dozen literary journals & magazines, including Plough, Prism, Redivider, Palisades Review, and Smokelong Quarterly.
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