" To all the places you've never been "
I sometimes think there are places that exist only as an absence inside us.
Not because we have been there and left, but because somewhere along the way, we became aware of their shape.
A street we have never walked can still feel familiar. A room we have never entered can appear in our dreams with the strange intimacy of memory. There are cities whose names alone can make us ache, though we have never stood beneath their pouring skies.
Perhaps some longings are like that.
Not for what we have lost, but for what we have never known.
I have known love. I have been fortunate enough to find it in small hands and familiar voices, in the unquestioning devotion of animals, in friendships that have carried me through seasons, in the quiet and enduring presence of family. Love has found me in many forms.
And still, sometimes, there is this feeling.
As though there is somewhere else.
Not somewhere better. Not somewhere I have been denied. Just somewhere I cannot name—a way of being, perhaps. A particular kind of closeness. A room in the world whose door I have never found.
I don't know what waits there. I don't even know if anything does.
But occasionally, usually without warning, I miss it.
Not with the sadness of someone looking backwards, but with the peculiar ache of looking towards a horizon and recognising something you have never seen.
Maybe that is Fernweh.
To feel the absence of a place without ever having known it.
To carry, somehow,
a memory of something that was never yours.
And to wonder, quietly,
if somewhere in this vast and unfinished life,
you are still on your way there.