I don't know what it says...

...but it could say 'homesick'.

I often have a homesick feeling. But I'm at home. Or else, I am not missing home. Or else I don't know what home means.

I think that's the point. What if there is no home?

Of course, there is this house, in which I live with my companion creatures and my stuff, like this lovely laptop and my precious watch (which I don't wear because of all the bloody hand-washing) and my car, though of course, Simba is not in the house. He stays outside. And... well, my books, my Kindle, my iPhone, my glasses. My bottles of wine. My toothbrush. My collected stones. My paintings.

Anyway, I live here. It feels like home when I am in bed. I can't spend as much time there as I want because of the dog. He might be lonely if I am upstairs.

So maybe I could feel homesick for my bed? Not sure that explains it.

There's a Portuguese word, saudade, which, apparently, you can't really understand unless you're Portuguese and have felt it. (There's a rather nice list of untranslatable words here.) The translation goes like this: a melancholy nostalgia for something that perhaps has not even happened, with an assurance that this thing you feel nostalgic for will never happen (again). Now, this word has some pleasure to it - a bittersweetness - and I do think I felt it when I was an adolescent. I'd never be a child again but I had never been the child I wanted to have been. Yet I was going to be something else. And I could recall the child I never was with an affectionate tenderness.

I get a feeling somewhat akin to that at the changing of the seasons, from spring to summer and summer to winter. I think there's a longing for the ideal summer which I know I'll never enjoy.

That's not quite my homesickness. It's a bit less... temporal. It's a yearning and an absence and a missing and a bleakness.

I did a very brief internet search to see if there was a word that summed this up. Depressingly, I found this: 'Yearning predicts subgenual anterior cingulate activity in bereaved individuals'. Right. Thanks.