Hiraeth

I was around thirteen years old when I first started feeling. When I say “feeling,” I mean, feeling heartbreak or sadness about circumstances. I mean, feeling things that typically kids don’t feel until they’re not really a child anymore. I would feel confused with things in life or about my emotions towards my friends or about my latest crush. (ha! “latest.” In my lifetime, I had 3 real crushes that ignored me and hurt me -- I knew girls who went through dozens!)

I’m not sure exactly what made this image come to my mind. I think it was a dream, but after the first time I envisioned it, it had become a staple in my mind. Every moment I had to sit in silence and thought, I would see it. For years:

A woman – from behind – standing on the edge of a white beach at night. A sea of

blackness melted into the dark sky that was speckled with stars. Her white dress gently fluttered in a breeze. The visual was beautiful but it was sad at the same time. So many emotions would flood through me as I would lie there, visualizing the scene over and over.

Sadness. Heart break. Regret. Guilt. Confusion. Homesickness. Hiraeth.

Hiraeth is a longing for a home you can't return to, or one that was never yours. Not necessarily a house, but a homely feeling such as love for a person you never met, or a place you've never physically been to.

I was thirteen when I first saw this image. At thirteen, you usually don’t have enough experiences in life to feel all of those emotions – especially to feel them all at the same time...as if I’d done something wrong and couldn’t turn back.

I still to this day don’t understand why this image and these emotions came to me so soon. I forgot about them for years until a deja vu moment hit me one day (years later!) and the image came to mind once again – the sad girl on the beach. And, I have realized now that, throughout my life, the emotions felt in that vision followed me my entire life. Even when things go well, hiraeth is there. It’s the most peculiar thing to feel when you’re happy because, well, it’s a sense of sadness that hits out of nowhere and for no particular reason; but it's a sadness for something unattainable. It’s a sudden desire to jump up, drop everything, and run out looking for it but you know you can’t reach it, you can’t touch it, or it simply doesn’t exist. Sort of like desiring a star. You stand on the tallest mountain, on your tippy toes, reaching – stretching – as far as your body can possibly manage but you still can’t touch it. It’s too far. It’s completely, utterly beyond your reach.

To be honest, I don’t know why I’m sharing this. I was just working on a new book and I was excited. I was moving forward, outlining, plotting and then, boom – deja vu. I stopped, looked out the window to a leafless tree, and in my mind, I saw the image of the woman on the beach, and with it came the string of emotions.

I’m going to go back to my writing and enjoy the wintery scene out of the window. Maybe I’ll find a story for that girl on the beach and share it with the world and maybe it’ll speak to someone.

I guess that’s all I could really hope for from something like this.

Lilian