Hiraeth

57s 900ms

noun | / hɪˈrɛθ /

Ever present, looming, simmering under the surface. Illumination comes, but akin to focusing past infinity with the hopes of convergence on what it actually is - a blurry image. Always just a little bit out of reach. In some senses it feels like an existential Shepard tone. Familiar and foreign at the same time, coming and going but never really dissipating. Perennial.

There were days when I would look out the windows in my pre-teen years, till my eyes glaze over, feeling what I would now call ma (間) - the intervals, the in-betweens. The ghost notes on the drums, the syncopation in jazz. In those moments I would feel like the observer, as I usually would have, always beside myself before ebbing back into corporeality.

We tend to anchor to specific constructs, like things tend to entropy. Coalescing into matter that fills the hollow bodies with substance and shape. We assign ourselves this shape after the fact, most of the time not questioning why we have taken this form as it provides the lucidity we require.

The materiality being an illusion realised too soon led me to the only recourse, latent.