On Longing

Longing lives inside me as a full presence. Not as a lack or something missing, but as a living state. It breathes quietly, moves gently, and insists in its own time. It stretches across words and years, across distances and different versions of myself, and keeps returning to the same questions. Who am I? Where do I belong? Where am I going?

I long for the feeling of being close to family and for the simplicity that comes with it: walking into a home without preparation or explanation, sitting down to a meal, letting my body sink into a couch while my parents’ voices fill the room in the background. I long for the ease of walking down a street and trusting my body to know the way, for the quiet confidence that comes when the feet understand something before the mind needs to.

I long for light, for skin warmed by the sun, for evenings that soften gently into night. I long for air that does not cut. These sensations rise with particular force in the heart of winter, when my inner orientation begins to waver. No matter how many layers I put on, I cannot quite become one with this climate or with its sharp and persistent cold.

Winter almost convinces me every time. It makes me want to pack everything and return to a house I once had long ago, where the view from the window opened onto fields and trees, where the earth carried a scent rather than ice, and where I could dig my hands into sand, feel leaves, and let the sun burn and warm at once.

I long to walk barefoot and feel the ground beneath me. I long to sit without purpose, watching people pass, hearing words I do not need to work to understand. These are old longings, the kind that slowly turn into old dreams. Dreams that no longer point to a single place on a map, but to a feeling I continue to search for.

And still, in winter, the pull remains. It is a quiet but insistent call, not only to return home, but to return to myself. Not to a fixed address, but to a sense of inner alignment that feels familiar and true. A desire to gather what has scattered and recognize myself again, even as the landscape around me changes. Perhaps this is what these longings have become over time. Not instructions to go back, but reminders of who I am beneath the layers, the distances, and the seasons. A call to find myself somewhere in between, and to learn how to belong there.