My first hobby was people-watching. I have a clear memory of being five or six years old, tuning out my family’s conversation in favor of a young couple across the small café we were dining at. They were having a tense, quiet argument — “Then why did you take my Barbie dolls?” the woman hissed — but after a long moment of silence, without warning, their faces melted back into honeymoon-stage, heart-eyes love.

Though I was young, I was fascinated, even a bit overwhelmed, by this tiny display of  humanity; even still, I feel the same way every time I witness something similar. I want to  capture it. I want to bottle up each ounce of humanness, each inexplicable glance and gulp and half-smile, and hide it away for safekeeping. Of course, this is a fantasy (and maybe also a bit creepy), so instead I attempt to depict the unrestrained humanity I’m drawn to through writing. I  strive to pen characters who are as bumbling but charismatic, lost but ever-searching, as Milkman, the protagonist from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. I am drawn to Guitar, Milkman’s determined but misguided best friend, and Ruth, his nurturing but passively  subjugated mother. Despite my many attempts, however, I can only wish to create characters like Morrison’s, whose subtle quirks and flaws would, too, catch my attention from across a café.  Still, she seems to share my exasperation: according to Morrison, capturing true humanity through literature is impossible.

In her 1993 Nobel Lecture, Morrison argues that language’s “force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.” Until recently, I wondered: how can there be such “force” in  something that is always chasing an unattainable ideal, never quite grasping the power it hopes to  portray? Where is the “felicity” in perpetual failure? I spent many hours with this pessimistic mindset, scribbling out full pages of my glittery elementary school journal, stumbling over words as I told and retold stories to my friends. Language may have the “ability to limn the […] lives” of each person who engages with it. But I didn’t — still don’t — want to merely “limn” the  human experiences I observe, I want to recreate all and every part of them. Just as a painting can never exactly resemble a photograph, a written story can never exactly resemble real life.  That frustrated me endlessly, especially when I was younger.

“Did you see that?” I whispered to my family across the restaurant table, trying to point at the couple without them noticing. Met with a response of “Hmm?” and “Don’t stare, Lila” I  shook my head with a dismissive “Never mind.” Without my family seeing the interaction firsthand, I realized, I could never explain its raw vulnerability.

Ten years later I wake up, groggy, and turn on NPR on my way to school. It’s a morning ritual, though one I have recently used to hear empty voices rather than to listen to stories they have to tell. Today, a Palestinian man’s voice plays through my car radio, crackling from static or  tears. “My mother, my wife… my sons, my brother, my dog,” he says in deep, accented English,  “I have lost them all since October.” He lists off name and name and name, slow but rehearsed,  like a classmate’s presentation, a mother telling her child their chores for the fifth time. The  cracks are static, I decide, not tears — and somehow that is even sadder. By leaving his pain  unsaid, his voice steady, he is accentuating it even more. It’s not that this man’s family is worth  only a ten-word list, it’s that they are worth so much that twenty, fifty, or five thousand words  could never do them justice. It’s that tragedy is so common in this world that a man can recount his family’s death like they are a grocery list, that those listening to him from 7,000 miles away can tune out his grief like I did every morning before this one. His words and lack of them hang in the staticky silence and stale car air, signaling, as Morrison describes, deference to the  uncapturability of the [lives he] mourns.”

In response to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Morrison says that Lincoln’s  simple statements “[refused] to monumentalize, disdaining the… precise summing up,” the  oversimplifying of something so complex yet so straightforward in its harm, the "monumentaliz[ing]” or “remembering” of something that continually affects the present and the  future. Whether in response to the Civil War, the current Israel-Hamas War, or something much  less consequential — like a simple act of love in a café — “it is the deference that moves [both  Morrison and me], that recognition that language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it.” Through their absence and their limitations, the Palestinian man on NPR’s words don’t diminish but heighten the complexity and anguish of his lived human experience.

Slumped against my car window, I realize this is what drew me to the café couple ten years before, why I love people-watching and eavesdropping, why I yearn to capture it all through language. It hurt to scribble out page after page of my childhood journal. Now, I feel the same way as I scroll through my discarded Notes app drafts on growing up, queerness, or being  Asian — topics that, as my fingers strike my laptop keyboard with an almost-aggressive vigor,  consume me so wholly I could never do them justice. However, I’ve learned, these frustrations  are what give words their power. Language’s (and, in turn, my own) inability to capture “the  ineffable” isn’t a failure, as I once believed, but a triumph. Humanity’s fascinating,  overwhelming “force” is that it refuses to be “pin[ned] down” by language, while language’s force is that it refuses to pin down humanity — or, as Morrison would describe it, the  ineffable.