It is on a quiet walk back to Ryan on a Sunday evening that I hear it: the sound of little feet, running. I smile, and my mind invites me into a memory.
I am a ninth grader coming home after a busy day at school. I hear the sound of little feet running towards me.
“Hannah!”
A trill and two little hands rap around my knees. I kneel down and gather my two-year-old brother into my arms.
The memory folds into itself and vanishes, leaving a tiny ache.
“Daniel, I wish you were here,” my heart murmurs. For a moment, I long for something that is far away. Then the familiar “Sunday scaries” hits hard, and the longing fades into oblivion.
I’ve almost never been homesick in college. At least that is what I like to tell myself. On the Monday my parents left to go back to India, I allowed myself to cry for five precious minutes, and then resolutely turned my mind to the then-scary Moreau QQC and the theology assignment that was due before my first class. Throughout that semester and the last two years, I have teared up, sobbed, cried oceans because of my statistics class, for the friends that I believed I did not have, for my broken relationship with Jesus, because I felt lonely, tired, angry. But I have almost never cried for my home.
I tell myself that I have never been homesick, but suddenly I am not sure anymore.
I remember the day I discovered hot sauce in the dining hall. That evening I ate fried rice and potstickers drenched in Cholula. I relished its slightly painful sting. I remember biting down on jalapeños, discovering Flaming Hot Doritos and popcorn. As the spices filled my mouth and enflamed my tongue, I remembered home. I longed for every flavor I couldn’t taste. Is this homesickness?
I remember my first fall break at Notre Dame. Everyone I knew had gone home. It was just me, alone in a world of space and silence.
I opened my computer and played all the Indian songs that my mother had compiled into a goodbye present for me. The silence filled with familiar music, songs that Amma had forced us all to listen to as she cooked in the kitchen, songs that we had hummed under our breaths in the car. As my ears filled with sound, my throat opened and I began to sing. I sang, I proclaimed to the silence: “This is who I am, who I belong to, what I love, what I long for. Hear me!”
My eyes were dry, but I knew both joy and pain. I hope this is not what homesickness feels like.
I remember that time when my friends and I drove to get ice cream. It was one of those moments when I knew with absolute certainty that I belonged, that I was seen and loved. I rested my cheek against the window, staring out into the dark sky and the orange streetlights that flitted past. But that joy made me long for more, and the longing became a familiar ache.
My family loved going on night drives. All five of us: Amma and Appa arguing over how loud the music should be in the car, Hanok, with his thousand questions, all three of us kids fighting for no reason that adults could comprehend.
We always drove to the same place, the walkway that bordered the Arabian Sea. We always got ice cream from one of the tiny ice cream vans and sat down on benches facing the sea. Sometimes we talked between bites, sometimes we just huddled together in silence.
As my friends and I drove back from Dairy Queen with giant ice cream cones, I asked myself: “Am I happy?” I knew I was. “If this is not happiness, then what is?”
Yet that ache persisted. Surrounded by the love of my friends, I longed for home.
I remember that Saturday morning when I heard Hanok’s voice break over the phone, and longed to take him in my arms. I remember struggling to find words to tell Amma that I was lonely. I remember the numbness that came over me when Amma told me that she was sending me hugs from home. I remember coughing a night away during spring break, and longing for Appa’s cool hand on my forehead, for the cup of hot water that he would curl my fingers around. I remember fearing my first visit back home. What if I had changed too much? I remember being wrapped in my parents’ embrace and realizing that everything, almost everything, was the same. I remember longing for Notre Dame while I was at home. I remember longing for a world in which I wouldn’t have to choose between my family and my friends, between my two homes that are separated by oceans.
Is this homesickness? No, I don’t like to think so. Homesickness, to me, is a disease that steals my joy in the present, my certainty that Notre Dame is mine and I belong here. But if this is not homesickness, then what is it?
I think I will call these memories, these longings, saudade or hiraeth. They are Portuguese and Welsh words that I just discovered and want to hold close, two words from two different tongues that capture the same feeling: a longing for something beautiful that is now gone, or too far away.
Hannah Alice Simon was born and raised in Kerala, India, and moved to the U.S. for college with the dream of thriving in an intellectual environment that celebrates people with disabilities. On campus, you will mostly see her taking the longest routes to classrooms with her loyal cane, Riptide, by her side. She studies psychology and English with minors in musical theatre and theology. You can contact Hannah at hsimon2@nd.edu.
