Homesick for a World That Is Gone

Weekends that began with your grandmother waking you early, not urgently, not loudly, but with purpose. Water the plants. Drink yerba maté. The day has already decided to be gentle.

You would come home to the familiar geometry of safety. Your brother studying in his room, door half closed, present without demanding attention. Your mother placing warm plates on the table, not because dinner was an event, but because dinner was inevitable. Hunger was temporary. Care was assumed.

Survival did not feel like a project.

At the time, you did not know you were living inside something finite. No one ever does. We mistake repetition for permanence. We mistake routine for law.

Now the math is different.

Your brother is married. You see him rarely, if luck cooperates. The room where he once studied belongs to memory now, not to him. Your grandmother is gone. And the final cruelty is that she left with just enough clarity to recognize your voice.

It was supposed to be the last moment. Your cousin held the phone close. You spoke into it carefully, as if volume could summon time. She did not remember everything, but she remembered you. She asked if you were visiting soon.

You did not.

And now there is no soon.

This is the kind of loss that does not announce itself with drama. It settles in slowly, like climate. You wake up one day and realize you live in another hemisphere. Another timeline. Another life that does not contain the people who once made life intelligible.

The past is sealed. The future is unrecognizable. The present feels like a waiting room without a departure board.

We are taught that nostalgia is indulgent. That longing is weakness. That adulthood requires acceptance. All true, in theory. In practice, longing is not optional. It arrives whether invited or not.

What hurts is not just that those people are gone. It is that the version of you who belonged among them is gone too. The self who woke up without calculating survival. The self whose anxiety had not yet learned its sharpest edges.

You were loved then. Surrounded. Embedded. Now love requires scheduling. Belonging requires effort. Warmth requires planning.

Your parents are retired now. They are at home. You are also at home. But not the same home. Not the same warmth. Your home is cold and quiet and far away. Far not just in distance, but in meaning.

People will say this is life. They are correct and unhelpful.

Change is permanent. Everything else is negotiable.

We grow up believing that people and places are fixtures. That if we leave, they will wait. That homes pause when we exit them. They do not. They continue. They age. They dissolve. They complete their arcs without consulting us.

What remains is a strange grief that has no object you can hold. You are not only mourning your grandmother. You are mourning Saturdays. You are mourning a nervous system that did not yet know fear as its default language.

You find yourself asking a forbidden question. Not whether life should end, but whether this version of it should. Whether you should stop striving toward futures that do not contain the warmth you recognize. Whether you should return, not to undo time, but to live what remains closer to where it began.

This is not escape. It is accounting.

There is no answer that resolves this cleanly. Philosophy offers consolation. Psychology offers frameworks. Neither can give you back a kitchen table or a voice on a weekend morning.

The unbearable part is not that everything changes. It is that we only understand what something was after it is no longer available.

Homesickness for a vanished world is not sentimental weakness. It is evidence that something real once held you.

And even now, far away, it still does.

S.N