the museum
some feelings have no word in the language a person thinks in. another language often has one.
museum of sorrow is an app for iphone. it keeps a few hundred of these words, from many languages. each one is real, each has a dictionary entry, and the app links to it. no word is invented.
it does not try to mend the feeling. it names it, and stays a while.
one of the words
тоска
toska
russian
Melancholy and depression; a state of sadness and low spirits.
Nothing was wrong, and he stood on the balcony anyway, smoking, looking at the lights of the far bank.
wiktionary: тоска, russian
definition adapted from Wiktionary, by Wiktionary contributors; shortened and rewritten. CC BY-SA 4.0
the search
the search is slow, and it is meant to be. what was typed dissolves into drops of ink on wet paper. letters from many scripts rise through the page and fade. lines draw themselves between the drops until they are the word.
then the page takes one color, the color of that feeling, and a few small things drift across it: birds, petals, ash or dust. under the word there is where it comes from, a sentence that needs it, and a short story. nobody gives advice.
the journal
a word can be kept. the kept words gather on a wall, each a small wash in its own color. at first the wall is mostly grey.
a second page puts the same words in rooms, one room for each language. nothing is counted there, and nothing is asked for.
if it is asked to, the museum sends one word each monday. it sends nothing else.
what stays on the phone
nothing you type leaves the device. the search runs on the phone, and the app works with no network. there is no account, and there are no ads.
the app does send a record of what happened, without the words: which word was found, which pages were opened, whether the crisis card was shown and which country's hotline was touched, whether it crashed. the privacy page lists all of it.
there is one thing to buy, a tip. it unlocks nothing.