Language
Two Words for a Feeling We Cannot Quite Name
You can say, I miss you.
You can say, I miss home.
You can say, I wish things were the way they used to be.
But sometimes, none of these quite says what you mean.
Portuguese has a word for one kind of longing saudade.
It describes a deep, bittersweet longing for someone or something absent. It can be a person, a place, a memory, a particular time, or even a life that once felt within reach.
Welsh has another beautiful word hiraeth.
It carries a longing for home, belonging, or a past that cannot truly be returned to.
They are not the same.
And perhaps that is what makes them so beautiful.
Saudade is the ache of absence. Hiraeth is the ache of belonging.
Yet sometimes, absence and belonging become the same ache.
We may miss a house that no longer feels like home.
A friendship that slowly became a memory.
A person we can no longer reach.
Or a younger version of ourselves who knew nothing about losing things.
Perhaps that is one of the stranger things about growing older.
We do not always want to go back.
We know we cannot.
Sometimes, we simply want to remember what it felt like to be there.
A song can take us back.
A photograph can take us back.
A familiar smell, an old street, the light falling through a window in a particular way.
For a moment, the past comes close.
And then, just as quietly, it slips away.
Maybe that is where saudade and hiraeth meet.
Not in the exact meaning of the words, but in the human feeling behind them.
The longing for something we know we cannot quite have again.
Because sometimes, what we miss is not really the place.
It is not even the person.
It is who we were when we had them.
Perhaps that is why some memories remain bittersweet. We do not want to erase them, even when they hurt.
The ache itself tells us something.
Something mattered.
Someone mattered.
A time in our life mattered.
And maybe that is what these two beautiful words give us: not a way to get the past back, but a way to name the feeling of carrying it with us.
Saudade. Hiraeth.
Two languages.
Two different shades of longing.
And one very human truth:
Not everything we lose is meant to be found again. Some things are meant to become memories. And some memories remain with us simply because, once upon a time, we belonged.
