“There are places I remember…..all my life
Though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain”
Those simple words written by Paul McCartney and John Lennon have always stirred something deep in my soul.
Do you ever miss a place you’ve never been?
There are many places in this world that I have never been, but there are two places I have never been that my heart longs for….when I go to that place of melancholy memory. It is a feeling that is so palatable as to be a physical longing.
My soul weeps with the emotion of a long awaited homecoming…just there, beyond the horizon…
Sometimes it will be reading about a far off place that brings the longing, but often it will come from dreams. Over the years there have been times where I feel so certain that I have been somewhere else as I sleep that it is startling, but never frightening. Images so deeply etched in my subconscious that they become conscious and I have found it difficult to find clarity for several moments after waking.
Mostly it is the music …. the rythmn of an African drum matches the beat of my heart…I feel joy to the roots of my being. The drum calls to me and something almost primal stirs …nothing I can explain.
The emptiness and ache is the worst when I see pictures of, or hear music from, Scotland….odd given my Irish heritage….but I have never been drawn to Ireland like I have Scotland. I feel such an affinity, a yearning that calls me ‘home’….home to a place I have never been.
It’s a nostalgia for a time and place that I’ve never experienced. It’s not Deja-vu; it’s something more than that. A yearning that is unexplainable….defies words, but not emotion.
I am pensive, despondent. I feel such profound sorrow at never being able to attain the joy I know I once had in these places of my non existent memory. Perhaps one day I will travel to these, the places of my heart. Perhaps I will not. For I have been there. Once. Long, long ago.
offthecuffbyplnear 