A beautiful word

Hiraeth, a Welsh word, meaning of which is ‘a homesickness for a home you can’t return to, or that never was’, is a beautiful feeling of longing, of yearning, or of grief for the lost places of the past, or the places never existed yet existed for me, or for you.

At most times, I, or we humans, generalize existence as a state of perpetual being, until that perpetuity finally comes to a halt. Then, that thing, anything, ceases to exist- a loss of life, broken glass vase, lost soul mate, or distant friend. How do these things- life, vase, friend, or lover- can ever cease to exist if we still think about them? Don’t they exist, maybe in a place unreachable by a normal human sightedness? Again, maybe.

When I think of home, I rarely think of the walls, the color of my room’s curtains, or what’d be kept on the side table of my bed. Rather, an eerie, almost fleeting, feeling of how the subtle coldness in my room would feel inside my blanket whose color I don’t remember crosses my mind.

Hiraeth, a beautiful word, defines for us a feeling of homesickness, but it doesn’t define what home means to us. Home, another beautiful word, can encompass things unimaginable for one, but perfectly in existence for someone else.

Whenever I’m about to visit a new place- mountain, forest, town, village, or city- I try to picture it in my subconscious. I make efforts to bring to life the details of the place I’m about to see. There’d be a pole on the walking trail with yellow light and a bird sitting on top of it. Or, maybe there’d a row of trees making noise as the wind whistle passes through them. Or, maybe there’d a row of houses with protruding balconies, some empty some filled with life. Or, maybe, just maybe, it’d be a rustic place with cafes alongside the road on which are people walking their dogs and pedaling their cycles. Different places are pictured in different ways, just based on the imagination that comes from subtle hints about them.

A comparison between reality and imagination is never accurate, but maybe in that very imagination, I try to visit a place I long for but I have never been to. Who knows?

There are things that make you believe you are complete. That accomplishment of scaling Mount Everest, that warmth of hugging your mother, that fear of saying I love you to your father, or that connection you feel with someone without saying a word. A longing for that maybe hiraeth as well. A longing for completeness.

You’d be able to clean the vase that broke into pieces and you’d be able to trash it, but maybe, you won’t forget longing for visiting the place where it still exists. Maybe, you’d call that your hiraeth.

Or, a mountain I long for. Just maybe.