AGNES CHEW

An Etymological Sketch of Sorrow

To arrive at a place is to have departed another. Last evening I arrived in lakeland Finland to begin a month-long residency, having left what has become my second home in Germany. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, to arrive is to reach a place, especially at the end of a journey; or to start to exist. The word can be traced back to Old French (ariver: to come to land), Vulgar Latin (arrīpāre: to touch the shore), and Latin (ad ripam: to the shore). The original notion seems to be of coming ashore after a long voyage, a notion that feels poignant. After spending days, weeks, or months at sea, surrounded by swirling swathes of blue and grey, to arrive is to feel the tactile pleasure of feet on solid ground, crumbly soil in weathered palms—one brims with anticipation of the adventure ahead, but also apprehension about everything left behind.

Light is what I notice on my first night in Finland. Sleepless, I watch it seep into the room, illuminating the edges of the blinds, the contours of the wooden desk, the blue-cushioned chair, the lamp—all bearing an unfamiliarity that will fade over the course of the month. As a child, I was afraid of sleeping in the dark, a fear that precipitated an insatiable desire for glow-in-the-dark stars. After moving to Germany at the age of thirty, into an apartment fitted with metal blackout blinds, I grew accustomed to nights soaked in darkness. Now, my body adjusts to the light of gloaming, where night should have been. Light. Inherited from Germanic, it shares the same Proto-Indo-European base as Sanskrit, ancient Greek, Early Irish, Welsh, and Lithuanian. A monosyllabic word that carries multiple meanings, ranging from the literal to the figurative. Light as illumination, as mood, as reduced gravity. By morning, the bedroom has become light. So has my mind, untethered from the weight of quotidian life.

All morning it has been blustery and grey. Wind whips at the windows of this century-old wooden villa, threatening to break in. At noon I venture out for lunch; what should have been a ten-minute walk nearly doubles in duration. The hot salmon soup offers a brief respite before I begin the cold walk back, following the path flanked by dead grey sunflowers, their bowed heads flailing in the biting wind. Back at the house, the landscape beyond the window, awash with grey, appears entirely different from the previous day. Grey is the colour of rain clouds. Grey is having hair that has faded with age. Grey is the weather when light is lacking. Grey is also boring and sad. The word is commonly spelled ‘grey’ in British English and ‘gray’ in American English. The Oxford English Dictionary reports attempts to distinguish between the two; ‘grey’ is said to take on a lighter, more delicate hue. Perhaps, I should begin again: All morning it has been blustery and gray.

Choices mark our days. Choices ranging in gravity, in intentionality, bearing effects that may last only for a fleeting moment or for always. The earliest known use of ‘choice’ is in the Middle English period, from 1150 to 1500. A borrowing from French (chois: one’s choice; fact of having a choice), the word is derived from the verb choisir (to choose; to perceive). The latter is said to stem from Germanic, and related to Old English ceosan (to choose; to taste). The correlation between choice and taste may be unsurprising, but it reminds me of the aftertaste of each choice I make. Heat or acid in my mouth, depending on what I cook for lunch. Sweet relief or bitter pain that iced milk tea induces, depending on whether I am in sweltering Singapore or Finland’s reluctant spring. Last week in Germany, I cast my vote by mail. As I await the results of the general elections in my home country, I feel hope and unease about the nuanced flavours that will coat my tongue.

In the evening, stepping out of the sauna, I feel a rush of giddiness, a momentary loss of balance. Loss; a word that has experienced its own losses. It was once a verb, a borrowing from Dutch, used in Scottish English before becoming obsolete since the 1600s. As a noun, it finds its roots in Old English los (ruin, destruction) and Proto-Germanic lausa- (from the Proto-Indo-European root leu: to loosen, divide, cut apart). The etymological sense of dissolution to the word seems to have been lost, or weakened, over time. In Modern English, loss is defined as the failure to hold, keep, or preserve what was in one’s possession; the failure to gain or win; the death of a person. Loss ranging from the private to the political. Today, a day of losses.

The days are slipping by in a blur. A week passes, and then two. Suddenly, I have reached the midway point of my residency. I have spent my hours reading, writing, going on walks, eating rye bread, marvelling at the weather’s whimsies. A part of me wishes the proportions of each were different; yet a mentor reminds me that writing entails all of these things, that the act of putting words down on paper represents a late stage of the process. To trust the process, whatever its length. So I go on watching the pair of pigeons pecking in the yard, the duo of ducks rippling the lake’s glossy skin, the lone squirrel that darts across the length of the flaking orange sorbet fence and up the ladder of the red-brick house to emerge triumphant atop the pale blue roof. The word ‘blur’ exists as both noun and verb, yet their mutual relation is said to be uncertain. A blur is something you cannot see clearly; something that you cannot remember or understand fully. That the origin of the word remains unknown is perhaps apposite. There is so much in my heart that I cannot apprehend, so many past lives built and left behind.

Agnes Chew is the author of the fiction collection, Eternal Summer of My Homeland (Epigram Books, 2023), which was longlisted for The Asian Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for the POPULAR Readers’ Choice Award, and a national bestseller in Singapore; and the essay collection, The Desire for Elsewhere (Math Paper Press, 2016). Her fiction has won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Asia), and has been published or is forthcoming in Granta, Necessary Fiction, and Best New Singaporean Short Stories, among others. She has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Tin House, Granta Writers’ Workshop, and more. She is currently working on her first novel, which has been longlisted for the 2025 Goldfinch Novel Award. Born and raised in Singapore, she now lives in Germany.