hiraeth (welsh, noun): a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past.  (source: berlin art parasites)

nearly a year now.  reacquainted with the northern hemisphere.  it’s a different place than when i left it.  or i’m in a different space since returning to it.  either way a homesickness for my childhood home is what lured me back across the ocean.  yet i yearn for my melbourne mistress.  tis quite the conflicted conundrum i am in.

home for me is everywhere in which my heart has skipped a beat.  its scattered across germany, tucked away in malmo, packaged up in new zealand and weaved throughout canada.  but in lingers most between two urban dwellings: lost in my young annex shadows; layered beneath my vintage fitzroy frocks.  but i can still feel it beating.  i can still hear it humming.   nostalgia may be a stronghold but tis the joy of the present that turns any past grieved sorrow into new love for tomorrow.

home for me is every place in which i’ve been able to be.  bedroom filled lovers.  cozy chatterbox cafes.  gorgeous green gardens.  lonely lazy days.  dark corners of libraries.  littered streets of bicycle craze.  these are the places which home never was but safe havens they were.  from you, from me. from him and her.  i have no grief for these lost places because i found a cure within their creative spaces.

three hundred and sixty five days from now i will be somewhere different.  i will have left somewhere only to return right back here.  for acrobatic humans are always in constant change.  perhaps it is as jonathan coot said to susan sontag during their 1978 rolling stone dialogue, “in a way it sounds like a firefly that at the very moment you see its light you realize that it’s in fact already flown off somewhere else.”

forever fleeting, the hiraeth firefly.