whenever my life starts feeling like it is stable, things arise to make it quietly unbearable. worse, it is always the same things. once i had been accustomed to the territory of conflict but with time i have let myself recede from the greyness of the past, letting the lingering pain dissipate as i fled. but i return again like thick fog descending upon a war-torn city. the clarity of day that my eyes have seen becomes lost. i wander through.

Mamihlapinatapai: noun a look shared by two people each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start.

The word is from the Yaghan language, and its morphological structure is as follows:

mam- (reflexive/passive morph.) + -ihlapi- ‘to be at a loss as to what to do next’ + -n- (stative aspect affix) + -ata- (achievement affix) + -apai (dual, here reciprocal, marker).