Heimweh

In German, the word for homesickness is Heimweh, literally a pain for home. In Welsh, there is a more temporal element to the word hiraeth, indicating a longing for a time.

A friend of mine once said it's a combination of a person, place, and time that makes memories what they are.

Maybe it's living outside of the U.S. again. Maybe it's the holidays. But today I am strongly feeling Heimweh or hiraeth.

But where is, what is home? When I think about it, about places I've lived that I miss the most, sometimes it's the wonky house on Whitis Ave. in Austin where I lived with a bunch of guys. The house where mushrooms grew through the rotted floors, with the perpetual smell of weed from the musician that crashed on the couch. Sometimes it's the insane cooperative house I lived when I was doing my first round of grad school, with the bad food that only enthusiastic 18-year old vegans with a copy of the Moosewood Cookbook could produce and the love and enthusiasm of community that permeated that house. At other times, it's my San Francisco apartment with its drafty permanently rattling windows, with its enormous kitchen that was really the center of life in that house where my kid passed her childhood evenings, with me cooking our dinners while she practiced characters or made yet another art project out of cardboard and hot glue.

Sometimes it's a friend's house I miss. A kitchen in Florence where I spent many hours drinking coffee and wine while smoking endless cigarettes with a good friend spent in hours of the best conversations I've ever had in my life, where a night can pass before either of us realized it and we fought sleepiness simply because we enjoyed the conversation so much. A friend's farmhouse in rural France filled with sunshine and overflowing with the love she, her husband, and child share with each other. A friend's various apartments in Zurich with the order and chaos that comes from German housekeeping and rambunctious toddlers.

Sometimes it's the notorious cafe in Austin where I made the closest friends I'll ever have.

Sometimes it's spaces altogether disconnected from a particular person or living space. It's the path along Shoal Creek in Austin, with the creek actually running from a spring rainstorm. It's the Lustgarten on a fall afternoon with the linden trees changing colours or Helmholtzplatz in the snowy winter in Berlin. It's the winding paths of Golden Gate Park while walking through fog and redwoods, or Baker Beach at the golden hour, with the Pacific and the actual Golden Gate in full view with hues of gold and red and blue and grey, the glory of an endless horizon and steep headlands facing the vast ocean. It's the Ballard Locks during the salmon runs with harbor seals bobbing up and down while waiting for a meal. It's even now Wreck Beach with the logs and the grey water beyond, a quiet space away from the institutional campus at UBC and the car-clogged streets of Vancouver.

Home is an ambiguous concept for me. It's a feeling, not a place or a time. Home isn't Austin or San Francisco, it isn't even entirely the people I love, although it is more the people I love than anything else. Home is the spaces in the world entire where I have felt the happiest. I'll never really be whole since home, the people I love, the spaces that have given my life meaning and structure, are scattered. While that means I will always feel a pain for a time that was, for people far away, for places I might never see again, it means I'll likely find it again and again, no matter where I am and who I am with.