The Language of Melancholy

There is the mutter of German around me, swimming in the blur of astigmatism and the drunk of whiskey. Arabic in bed, in the dark, under the cigarette smoke and the tang of lime and beer. My eyes are closed in the vertigo, a breathy moan in my ear, it sounds like prayer. French in my dreams, even before I could speak it, I dreamt about you even before I met you. Spanish and Portuguese at work, color in the gray, saudade is a flavor of melancholy the British temperament couldn’t understand. Afeto. The name of a painting that hung in my childhood home I found out the title of three years after I’d tattooed the letters of it on my middle finger in a hostel basement kitchen. Words and emotions you can’t translate. English is like this, Tati explains to me, bringing both her hands down straight in the air, like something rigid and strict. Chanel tries to translate the passion of Arabic poetry, but the intensities aren’t conveyed in the same colors, lost in the distance, a mountain paled into blue. يقبرني Bury me. I’ll never understand. Angelo can write poetry in three languages, but when I walk up the steps of the hostel, he reads a secret language in my eyes.

‘You felt The Melancholy today, didn’t you?’ he interrupts me as I’m telling Obeid a joke. I feel happy and fine, I’d walked off The Melancholy after work in a two hour walk to Southbank and drank it away with a fancy whiskey I ordered in a low-lit nautical themed lounge overlooking St. Paul’s Cathedral. I stopped talking and looked at him with surprise. There’s a cigarette dangling between his fingers and a funny knowing glimmer in his dark eyes that sometimes happens. I hadn’t mentioned anything about the heaviness that had plagued me so intensely earlier. It was about 1 am now. I can see it in your eyes, he says. ‘It’s like that Led Zeppelin song,’ he snaps his fingers, trying to recall it, ‘where the drums fall in a rhythm behind the guitar. You’re talking, but your eyes are falling behind’. Angelo’s familiar with The Melancholy, you can see it in his eyes as well. Even when it’s not there, it’s always there. It’s all in the eyes, it’s a language you can’t be taught.