A Letter to the Longing {Hiraeth, what is home?}

What is home? Is it the four walls you sleep within? Is it the dusty air of a place you've never actually breathed? Is it the ocean?
Do your dreams rake desire over your heart to wake a mermaid?

Hiraeth; a Welsh word without direct English translation that means a homesickness for a home you can't return to, or that never was.

I am left plagued by hiraeth.

I am homesick.

I think, quite firmly, that our desires can wholly manifest into problematic dreams that climb atop pedestals of their own free will.

One such desire of mine has done just that - and it has created an ache in me that has, in intervals of time, proven insatiable.

It all begins with a smell.

Smell has to be the closest tangible time travel I know.

And your smell is made from the woods. Spiciness and an earth that just won't quit - and wood. A lumber yard seems to possess the prowess to absolutely wreck me.

But you don't actually smell that way.

Your arms. Strong, sinewy, kind. I sit, I wake, still feeling an imprint of them around me. Safe.

Were they really every there?

There is not much gentle about you. But, from a distance, at the start and completion of these miles in between us, I easily remember you solely existing within the tender and soft.

The feelings that remain - their edges are jagged and cutting.

Your words never hurt. They remain without callous or coldness; they are soft like rain and warm from the inside.

But much salt has left this body over the processing of your dilapidated words - cacophonous in delivery - and bone dry, empty promises.

There are no words for the chasms of loss I have felt, and let linger, over you.

Yet I still don't know what love means.

Because I have found, time and again, you never smelling or saying or touching or feeling just as I happen to remember you.

It has all been left off-mark, too slow, just this way of indigestible.

And I am left with an illness for space between two arms that were never mine. That were never up to be had.

Because for all my words, for every yes ever uttered, I ended up being met with only an empty-bellied finality.

You say so many things.

I'm beginning to wonder if you would even know how to want to mean them.

This thing - it never truly was everything I desperately hoped it'd be. There were long winded minutes of me actually thinking I needed them to be - the very next breath was dependent upon the need of it all.

For all the moments of fighting for you to be home, for you to be my home, it never was.

It has always been.

It must remain.

Hiraeth.