There are things we rehearse for years before we ever manage to say them, sentences we carry around in silence for so long that by the time they might be spoken, they have already changed shape, and there are words we pronounce with what feels like total precision and that nevertheless arrive, in the other person’s ear, somewhere entirely different from where we had aimed them.

Perhaps one of the strangest facts of being human is that we spend our whole lives trying to reach one another through a medium that was never built to carry us across intact, a medium that betrays us constantly and that we go on trusting anyway, as though repetition alone could eventually correct its failures.

We speak, we write, we touch, we explain ourselves again the following morning, we apologise for what we meant rather than for what we actually said, we correct a phrase days after it has already done its damage, and we return, sometimes for years, to conversations that ended long ago, replaying them until we finally locate the sentence that might have changed everything, had we only found it in time. And yet between one consciousness and another there remains a distance that language can cross only ever partially, provisionally, imperfectly.

It is tempting, of course, to imagine communication as a kind of transmission: I have a thought, I translate it into words, you receive those words and reconstruct the thought behind them, as if meaning travelled like a parcel handed cleanly from one set of hands to another. But almost nothing that matters between two people happens with that kind of cleanliness. A sentence does not simply move from one life into another; it leaves one context, one private history, one accumulation of experience, and it enters a completely different one, and somewhere in that crossing, inevitably, it is altered.

Martin Heidegger understood language as something considerably more unsettling than a tool we might pick up when we need to describe a world that exists quite happily without it. For him we do not first have a world and then, separately, invent words to talk about it; language is already woven into the way that world becomes intelligible to us at all, which means we inhabit it long before we ever learn to master it, the way a child inhabits a house built by people who died before she was born. This means that when I speak to you I am not simply handing over the exact contents of my mind; I am reaching, often without noticing, for words that existed long before either of us, words shaped by histories neither of us chose, and asking them to carry something that is, by its nature, radically private and radically mine.

Something is lost in that asking, almost by definition. The word 'grief' is not my grief, however precisely I deploy it; the word 'love' cannot hold the particular night I first understood that I loved someone, with all its ordinary, unrepeatable detail; the word 'mother' is far too small a container for an entire childhood, with its specific smells and silences and small betrayals; the word 'home' is simply incapable of holding every room we have ever left behind, every version of belonging and its opposite that the word is meant, somehow, to summarise. And still we use these words, because there is, in the end, nothing else available to us, no more precise instrument waiting in reserve.

Jacques Lacan pushes this fracture even further than Heidegger allows. For Lacan, language does not fail us occasionally, as though on a bad day; misunderstanding is built into its very structure, because once experience has been translated into signs, it enters a system in which meaning is never allowed to settle completely, in which a word means only through its shifting relation to other words, endlessly deferred, so that the thing itself, the raw experience we were trying to name, keeps slipping just out of reach of the very language we use to hold it. We say one thing, and the person across from us hears something else entirely, and this happens not because either of us is careless, stupid, or acting in bad faith, but because every word we speak arrives already carrying a private archaeology that the other person has no way of excavating.

Consider the simplest sentence exchanged between two people who love each other: I need you. To one person this might mean intimacy, the deep relief of finally being allowed to depend on someone. To another it might sound like dependence itself, a demand rather than a gift. To a third it might trigger fear, the sense of an obligation quietly being imposed. To a fourth it might already contain, buried inside those three ordinary words, the first tremor of an abandonment they have long anticipated. The same syllables, spoken in exactly the same tone, can open onto entirely different interior worlds, and this is perhaps why so many of our most painful arguments are not really disputes about facts at all but disputes between meanings, two people repeating themselves with mounting desperation because each believes, wrongly, that saying the same thing with slightly more clarity will eventually force the other person to inhabit their position. It rarely does. We want to be understood not approximately but exactly, entirely, without remainder, and that particular desire may simply be one that language was never equipped to satisfy.

There is something genuinely devastating in realising that a person can love you with real depth and still, in some fundamental sense, misunderstand you, that someone can know your body intimately, know your habits and your childhood stories and the precise way you take your coffee and the exact expression that crosses your face in the seconds before you cry, and nevertheless remain separated from the interior place from which your words actually originate. Intimacy does not dissolve that distance. If anything, it can make us feel the distance more acutely, precisely because we expect, unreasonably, that closeness should have earned us a kind of transparency it was never going to grant.

Ocean Vuong turns this very impossibility into the architecture of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The novel takes the form of an extended letter written by Little Dog to his mother Rose, a Vietnamese immigrant who cannot read, and it is difficult to imagine a more precise image of what human communication actually involves: a son setting down everything he has never been able to say aloud, addressed to a reader who will, in all likelihood, never encounter a single one of these words. The letter becomes, simultaneously, an act of communication and a quiet acknowledgement that communication, in the ordinary sense, has already failed. Vuong writes toward a person he cannot fully reach, and yet he keeps writing, and that “and yet” is doing an enormous amount of work, because it suggests that the impossibility of complete understanding does not render communication meaningless; it may, in fact, be precisely what makes communication moving in the first place. We speak because a distance exists between us. We write because something refuses to be transferred cleanly from one body into another, no matter how carefully we try.

If consciousness were transparent, if one person could simply experience another’s interior life directly, there would presumably be no need for poetry, for letters, for confession, for music, for metaphor at all; there would be no need to say “I love you” because the other person would already know, from the inside, exactly what that love felt like as it moved through us. But we do not have that access, not to each other and often not even to ourselves, and so we invent forms instead: a poem, a voice note sent at four in the morning when nothing else feels adequate, a letter addressed to someone who will never be able to read it, a song composed only after the relationship it describes has already ended, a sentence typed and deleted a dozen times before we finally decide it says too much or not nearly enough. Art may be one of the few places where the failure of language becomes strangely productive rather than merely frustrating.

Ordinary speech tends to demand precision — tell me what happened, tell me exactly what you mean — whereas poetry permits the opposite, allowing contradiction to remain contradiction, letting a single image carry weight that no explanation ever could. Vuong, who was a poet long before he became a novelist, seems to understand this instinctively; his language never tries to solve the distance between people, it simply stays inside it, refusing the false comfort of resolution. Perhaps this is why certain sentences in literature end up feeling more intimate than years of ordinary conversation with people we have known our whole lives — not because the writer knows us personally, which of course they do not, but because they have found a form for something we had already lived through without ever managing to name it, so that recognition arrives precisely where communication, in any conventional sense, seemed impossible.

There is another cruelty folded into all of this, and it has to do with timing. Language, it turns out, often arrives only after the moment in which it might actually have mattered. We finally understand what our parents were trying to tell us only once we have grown older than they were when they said it. We find the right words for an apology only after the person who needed to hear it has already disappeared from our lives, sometimes permanently. We understand, at last, exactly what a former lover meant by some offhand remark years after the relationship itself has ended, when the understanding can no longer change anything at all. Meaning, in other words, can be delayed almost indefinitely; a sentence spoken in 2005 may only fully reveal itself in 2026, because language, unlike the moment that produced it, tends to survive.

This may be why letters to the dead, unsent messages left permanently in drafts, and entire conversations conducted silently in one’s own head do not feel as absurd as they should, logically speaking — because communication was perhaps never defined solely by successful delivery, and the act of addressing another person can carry meaning even in the near-certainty that no answer will ever come back.

The real tragedy, then, is not that we fail to communicate with one another; it is that we so often come remarkably close and still fall short. Someone understands seventy per cent of what we meant, and we spend disproportionate energy aching over the remaining thirty. Someone says almost precisely what we needed to hear, but not quite, and that small discrepancy can feel, in the moment, larger than the entire conversation that preceded it. We recognise ourselves briefly and unmistakably in another person, and then, just as suddenly, we run up again against the border that separates us, a border that no amount of intimacy seems able to permanently dissolve.

Perhaps there is an ethical lesson hidden inside that recurring border: if another person can never be translated completely into our own private language, then loving them well might require a certain humility, a willingness to resist the seductive belief that we have finally, at long last, decoded them entirely. There will always be something we do not know about the people closest to us, something they themselves cannot fully explain even when they try, something language simply cannot reach no matter how carefully it is deployed. The other person remains, stubbornly and permanently, other.

None of this makes intimacy impossible, though it does mean that intimacy can never be a completed achievement, a problem solved once and then set aside; it is instead an ongoing, unfinished act, something we keep doing rather than something we eventually arrive at. We listen again. We ask again, often in slightly different words than the first time. We reach for another word when the first one clearly failed to carry what we needed it to carry. We misunderstand each other, inevitably, and then we return anyway, undeterred, to try once more. The genuine miracle of communication was never that language allows us to eliminate the distance separating one human being from another — it does not, and it never will — but rather that we go on speaking across that distance regardless, fully aware of how much of what we say will never quite arrive.