Hiraeth is my second-favourite word—after serendipity. It is also my most feared. Contrary to its philosophical and hypnotic definitions, the actual feeling of hiraeth is melancholic and downbeat. Let me tell you what it is, and see whether it rings a bell for you, too.
Hiraeth is about remembering a house perched on a small rise, facing a serene paddy field, where you spent your childhood Christmases—a place bound to nothing but that season of warmth and wonder. And when the next Christmas comes, there will be no such place to visit.
It is the wretched feeling that here once stood a house you used to walk to at night with your parents, along a firefly-dotted road, to visit your grandparents. The place where you tasted fizzy aerated drinks for the first time, and where you first raised your telescope to the moon. But today, you pass a land emptied of life—where only memory remains vivid. The house is gone.
You know hiraeth’s cold fingers around your heart when you recall that once it was only a matter of crossing a fence to reach the house next door—the true treasure chest of your childhood. A place that had a pond which stole half your awe, and a bookshelf where a certain storybook lived. A place once filled with music of every genre. And hiraeth hits hardest when you realise that even if you knock on that door, the one that once bore a pretty Christmas wreath every December, silence will not open it for you.
And then you remember the people who made those places alive. The ones whose laughter turned walls into homes. That is when you understand that homesickness, nostalgia, or yearning are not even remotely synonymous with hiraeth. When the awareness of their absence, and of that place’s absence, strikes, you realise that hiraeth cannot be explained with words. It can only be felt in that dreadful, beautiful moment when absence becomes a presence of its own.
Does hiraeth scare you, too?
~Roshini ✨