Hiraeth

Returning to the city always leaves me feeling alienated, especially when I return from Massachusetts. The first sign of skyscrapers behind the smallness of southern Connecticut renders me even smaller, foreign, my imminent landing a complicated dance I don’t feel I have the legs for. Usually I ache after the four hour train ride—in the lower back, from slumping in my seat; in the feet and ankles, from crossing and recrossing my legs, the circulation stopping and starting over and over; in the heart or the brain or both from not really knowing what I’m coming back to. Usually I wish the ride could be a couple hours longer, that maybe if it were I could figure this all out before I have to face it. But for obvious reasons, it never is.

I don’t know that returning to Massachusetts from the city makes me feel any different. Almost all of my people are gone, as are many of the stores and restaurants of my childhood. Even my room is different, rearranged or repainted. I can never find things in the kitchen cabinets—the silverware is now where the cooking utensils were, the plates and bowls are where the cups used to be, the bread is still where the bread once was but now it’s different bread. Sometimes I can’t even name what has changed but still I feel it in what once was.

Placelessness. Not the absence of a place to be, but maybe the inability to accept yourself as being there. It’s a strange sensation, to arrive somewhere and feel you’ve interrupted something. As though the city or home or street that had been carrying on just fine without you now has to readjust to the rhythm of your step, and what if it would rather not?

Once I was told that a perfect balance had been struck in my absence, that my return would mean upsetting it, but that was okay because I was loved and there was room for me. I was told that adjusting would be no problem at all. Of course this wasn’t true. I left and I was forgotten and the space I once filled closed up or was filled by someone or something else and so when I came back, there was nowhere for me to go.

What am I coming back to?

There’s a beautiful Welsh word that I don’t know we have an exact synonym for: hiraeth. Defined as a deep longing, bittersweet nostalgia, or homesickness for a place, time, or person that’s gone, or perhaps never existed. I don’t know what I’m missing. I really don’t. I wish I knew what I long so desperately for, what I seek in every new place I go, what is at the end of this years-long transience I find myself stuck in. I wish I knew. It breaks my heart to see others so solid in their geography, to be told that it takes time to adjust to a new place, to think that I might never. But the place is never the problem. It’s never really the place.

Maybe I can blame this all on the train, on the ride back, on the weather and the sky that I expect too much of. Maybe I can blame it on the little kid in the seat in front of me and his why why whys. Or on the guy across the aisle and his Subway sandwich. Or even the fact that it’s Monday again, and I haven’t had enough to eat, and my hair is greasy, and I need to wash my jeans. That I’m here and I’m not. That I will and I won’t. That it is and it isn’t.

What am I coming back to?

An apartment. Things in an apartment. Six more weeks of school, a bunch of half-finished projects. Friends. A sister. The next apartment I will live in and the next job I will have. Not a ton of food in the fridge. A ton of books on a few shelves, someone I want to give those books to and make read them so he can tell me what he thinks and so I can tell him what I think, too. And we can talk about how similar or different our thoughts are and in doing so come up with new thoughts, together.

Love, in its versions. In its various occurrences.

Words to define and pages to write for at least two more weeks and then what? Do I just stop? Where do I want my words to go?

I leave and I return and I feel less and less like a person of a place every time.

Once I asked a professor what happens if someone traveling abroad is stripped of their citizenship and can’t return home. He said it happened once, to an Iranian refugee whose papers were either lost or stolen so he was left stateless in Paris. He lived in terminal 1 of Charles de Gaulle for eighteen years. His name was Mehran Karimi Nasseri. He lived there from August 1988 to July 2006, before he had to leave for medical treatment. He slept on a red bench, shaved in the bathroom every morning, ate at McDonalds, and read newspapers given to him by newsstand attendants. He wrote an autobiography, The Terminal Man, was interviewed time and time again, and inspired the movie The Terminal. Eventually he left, but in September 2022 he returned and died in terminal 2F.