Starting in 2021, I always have this feeling of desolation. As if this metropolis lost important puzzle pieces or that something happened too fast, I didn’t have time to make the most of it. I didn’t know the exact way I was feeling back then. I didn’t even know that a word existed for it. It’s like having that itch in your hand that you can’t locate. That feeling, for the most part, was always that itch in my hand to me. 

Fast forward to late 2022, sometime around November, I stumbled across a book titled,  Saudade: The Love That Remains by Irenay Stevens. I never read the book, but the word saudade was embedded in my thoughts. 

Now, saudade, by definition, is the melancholic state of mind when one is nostalgic, or longing for something or someone that is no longer in the present. Personally, saudade is synonymous with the itch in my hand.

When I look around me, I can’t help but remember the line in the song “Are We The Waiting” by Green Day. It said, “This dirty town, is burning down in my dreams”. I’ve always associated this song with the sentience of waiting for something inevitable- something that is cruelly bound to happen, whether we like it or not. Or the feeling of heartbreak when something special shatters right in front of you, and all you have left are remnants from the past. It’s hard to recall the specifics of an event when someone asks us to, the same way we can’t answer someone straight up on the last time we beat someone at chess, or the last time we aced an exam in school. But for sure, we are certain that those things happened in the past. And we experienced it.  

If someone asks me, the exact moments when I felt saudade – I can tell you it happened, but I can’t mention the exact time and place. All I know is that I experienced it in a different hundred times. Such as accepting the absence of a loved one, the sadness of a favorite restaurant no longer in service, or a tree no longer providing shade in a specific part of the city. A laugh you never heard again, your online game friend from 3 years ago, or missing a four-pawed friend.

To mention a quote by C.S Lewis, “Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes but when you look back everything is different”. 

I wrote this piece to help someone feeling the same way.


End.