Elucidating Questions

What is cute?

I see it, I know it

It’s an omg I want to squish it

Like almost aggressive?

Feeling

You don’t want to destroy it you just want to love it and apparently human love is squishing?

And if there wasn’t a word for it

I feel like I’d still feel it

It’s such a raw feeling

Bubbling up

Ancient

I wonder what purpose it played, evolutionarily

Sure we see our young and think that’s cute and I want to take care of it

But we don’t just see it in our young, do we?

Eagles will raise a hawk chick

A lioness will raise a gazelle

It’s undoubtedly because they had that same omg that is cute feeling

Like raw, intimate, immediate attachment

Like foam exploding from a washing machine in one of those omg the kid put too much soap in it tropes

Poof

Now I love you

It doesn’t seem to be limited to young either

Humans have a trillion different ideas for what is cute to them

Some people don’t even think babies are cute

So, like, what’s that? The cuteness perception being broken?

And mothers already have a cocktail of hormones that happen when they give birth that make love happen

Is “cute” a fail-safe?

I think about emotions and what ones we would have felt before words

Were they simpler?

Or more complex?

Unnamed

Wild

Words tame things

I say the word cute it doesn’t really ring to the emotion it’s short and stubby and the emotion is big and bubbly and fuzzy

かわいい rings more true it’s longer and trails off like the feeling does like bam it’s here and then it’s just a quiet little murmur

Still doesn’t quite grasp the real feeling

Words are inept in that way

Even with them explaining emotions is hard

Some people have a way with words and they paint it

But paintings aren’t the real thing either

C’est ne pas une pipe

It’s not a pipe

Words are beautiful like art

They are real, but they are not real

These emotions

They’re so real, and I wonder where they came from

Who passed this to me?

Why?

Existence is a relay of passing from one generation to the next

I wish I could go back in time to the first blessed ancestor who felt “cute”

Ask why it’s with me today

I’m sure they wouldn’t know

But their story would be amazing