Hiraeth

A Welsh word I discovered a few years ago; hiraeth. It is described as a longing, a melancholia, an existential feeling. A homesickness for a person or place that maybe never was. I’ve felt this my whole life. A missing-ness of belonging where I am. Pamela Petro says, “So hiraeth is a protest. If it must be called homesickness, it’s a sickness come on—in Welsh ailments come onto you, as if hopping aboard a ship—because home isn’t the place it should have been. It’s an unattainable longing for a place, a person, a figure, even a national history that may never have actually existed. To feel hiraeth is to feel a deep incompleteness and recognize it as familiar.” This feeling lives with me and it wasn’t until I stepped into Morocco, that I felt a letting go of it. A relief that perhaps I had found a place that my soul knows or once knew. The feeling of longing for a place was replaced with a knowing, that I had found one. A place I feel instantly and deeply connected.