There are no real words for it yet, so I made one up: emitampy.
It means the phenomenon where memory and joy become one thing — a private galaxy spinning inside your chest.
It means the unbearable sweetness of living something you already know you will mourn.
It means the way the best moments of your life become a second bloodstream, a secret you carry even on the worst days.
We think of joy as simple.
It isn’t.
It is the most complex, layered, devastating thing we have.
You can’t always feel it happening. Sometimes it sneaks in through the cracks:
- It’s when you wake up next to someone you love, sunlight bleeding through the curtains, their eyelashes tangled against their cheek, and you know it won’t always be like this — but for now it is, and that knowing ruins and saves you at once.
- It’s standing in a kitchen barefoot, laughing so hard with your oldest friends that you feel the fabric of your life stretch, and in that stretch, a sadness — because you know there will be a last time like this, and it might already be behind you.
- It’s getting the call about your dream job, and you cry, not just from happiness but from a kind of grief, too — grief for every past version of you who was so scared it would never happen.
- It’s finishing a painting, or a poem, or a song at 3 a.m., looking at it under the wrong light, and feeling your chest split open because you made something real, and you know it will never belong fully to you again.
- It’s driving home late at night, a little drunk on life and music and starlight, and realizing that for once, you don’t want to be anywhere else.
Emitampy isn’t a mood. It’s a collision.
It’s all the versions of you — past, present, future — piling into one aching, gleaming point.
Scientists will tell you that memories aren’t perfect.
They’re reconstructed, flawed, distorted every time you revisit them.
You don’t remember the event itself — you remember the last time you remembered it.
And yet, strangely, the emotions encoded into those memories grow stronger over time.
Why?
Because the hippocampus, which sorts and files our experiences, works hand-in-hand with the amygdala — the brain’s emotional amplifier.
Every time a memory matters, it becomes more real.
More stitched into the quilt of your identity.
Which means the memories you cry over, the ones that make your hands ache when you think about them — they’re not ghosts.
They’re active participants in your consciousness.
They are still happening, right now, inside of you.
You are a city built out of remembered sunlight and long-gone songs and the exact feeling of their hand in yours.
There were mornings,
mornings where you held someone’s gaze and time lost all interest in moving forward.
You could hear the world outside: dogs barking, cars sighing down wet streets, neighbors arguing about nothing at all.
But inside the room, nothing else existed.
You could have stayed there forever.
You believed, maybe for the last time in your life, that forever was real.
There were nights when you laughed so hard you thought you might actually die from it.
You fell against your friends, breathless, stupid, golden with youth.
You laughed because everything was funny, and because nothing was — because you knew, secretly, that none of this was permanent, and that was the cruelest joke of all.
There were seasons of your life where you woke up electric with hope.
Job offers.
First apartments.
Plane tickets.
Phone calls that changed the shape of your future in a single sentence.
And you thought, this is it — this is when life finally starts.
You didn’t know that life had already started long ago, in smaller, quieter rooms you never thought to notice.
Emitampy is the realization that none of it was wasted.
Not even the boring days.
Not even the heartbreaks.
The mornings where you walked to class alone, clutching a bad coffee, listening to songs that no one else cared about — that mattered.
The afternoons spent lying in bed reading trashy novels because you were too sad to move — that mattered too.
The conversations you don’t even fully remember now, the ones where you stayed up till dawn solving the world’s problems in the safety of someone’s basement — those, especially, mattered.
You are not just the sum of your accomplishments.
You are the sum of your felt experiences.
Every fleeting second that you thought was throwaway has been quietly building the architecture of your soul.
Sometimes I think we are haunted not by what we have lost, but by the unbearable richness of what we have kept.
Isn’t that strange?
That the most devastating thing isn’t the pain, but the joy?
Because joy, when truly seen, always carries grief curled inside it, like a secret.
The moment you fully inhabit your own happiness, you glimpse its ending too.
You hold the birth and the death in your hands at once.
That’s what makes it sacred.
That’s what makes it break you open.
So what is the point of all of this?
Maybe it’s not about striving.
Maybe it’s not about fixing or winning or accumulating or even healing.
Maybe the point is simply this: to notice.
To sit at the kitchen table in the soft hour before sunset and realize —
I am here.
This is happening.
One day I will miss even this.
To hold someone’s face in your hands and recognize that they are a whole, unrepeatable universe, right now, right here.
To laugh until you can’t breathe and to cry because you laughed and to forgive yourself for being human enough to break under the weight of how beautiful it all is.
Emitampy is not a flaw in the system.
It is the system.
It is the way consciousness rebels against the idea of endings.
It is the soul’s way of archiving proof that we were here, that we loved, that we burned brightly for however long we had.
And so if today you find yourself wrecked with nostalgia,
if you find yourself aching for things you can’t name,
if you feel like your chest is a museum filled with artifacts from lives you barely remember living–good.
It means you were paying attention.
It means you are still alive, still gathering light into the deep pockets of your memory,
still building the secret map of your existence that no one else will ever fully see.
It means you are human.
And it means you have loved this world fiercely enough to miss it —
even while you’re still inside it.