Across
- 4. the frustration of knowing how easily you fit into a stereotype, even if you never intended to, even if it’s unfair, even if everyone else feels the same way
- 5. a conversation in which everyone is talking but nobody is listening
- 6. the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore
- 11. “a state of feeling that accompanies preoccupation with trivial and insipid diversions.”
- 12. an absence of pleasure felt in the presence of something that normally gives you pleasure
- 14. nostalgia for a time you’ve never known
- 16. the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach
- 19. a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details
- 20. a moment that seemed innocuous at the time but ended up marking a diversion into a strange new era of your life
- 22. a conversational hint that you have something personal to say on the subject but don’t go any further
- 25. to the anxiety or distress one feels when one is embarrassed or disappointed, or frustrated by one’s own failure
- 27. a moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life
- 28. an image that somehow becomes lodged deep in your brain which then grows into a wild and impractical vision
Down
- 1. a hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head which serves as a kind of psychological batting cage where you can connect more deeply
- 2. the moment you realize that you’re currently happy which prompts your intellect to identify it, pick it apart until it’s little more than an aftertaste
- 3. the smallest measurable unit of human connection, typically exchanged between passing strangers
- 7. that desire to care less about things
- 8. the kind of unnoticed excellence that carries on around you every day, unremarkably—the hidden talents of friends and coworkers, the fleeting solos of subway buskers, the slapdash eloquence of anonymous users, the unseen portfolios of aspiring artists
- 9. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time
- 10. a kind of psychological exoskeleton that can protect you from pain and contain your anxieties, but always ends up cracking under pressure or hollowed out by time
- 13. the awareness of the smallness of your perspective
- 15. the realization that each passerby you come across has a life as vivid and complex as your own
- 17. frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone
- 18. amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm
- 19. weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had
- 21. a flash of real emotion glimpsed in someone sitting across the room
- 23. the clinical term for any disorder of memory (as the inability to distinguish between real life and the fantastic), though is colloquially known as déjà vu
- 24. the awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience
- 26. the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet