Sylotion (noun): The attempt to infiltrate the mind of another.

I had a friend who thought life was defined by pyrsephia.

Pyrsephia (noun): The eerie emptiness of a normally filled place absent of people. Good for imagination.

She was obsessed with the creation of new words, new worlds. She had managed to keep herself unsullied with our madness, and kept herself busy with pure creation. She would sit outside after dark. Something about that emptiness spurned on her imagination. It's where she came up with pyrsephia. And zylphia. And internalisis.

Zylphia (noun): The sensation that someone is trying to speak to you, to communicate, and you can't hear it. That sadness of being on an entirely different wavelength and never being able to tune back into the thoughts of others.

Internalisis (noun): The realization that someone you've known for years has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a door you'll never open.

She was always adamant about being outside at night. She could never describe it to me except in the words of her creation, and she could never quite find the words for the definitions. I asked her once why she liked summer nights. She pondered for a minute before turning to me and replying, “Coriatosis.”

Coriatosis (noun): The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat, of a part of you pulsing and contracting and throbbing. Alternately, the realization of the fragility of your own heart, that any second it could stop and you would cease to be.

“You can hear everything,” she said. “The crickets scratch and cry and the wind whistles through the trees and everything is happening at once. There's no light and everything is pure sound and you hear everything until you hear nothing but the beating of your heart and you suddenly realize you're alive.” She looked at me when she finished, then looked down at her hands. “There are no real words to describe it,” she said.