The Weight of Temporary Joy—and How to Let It Go
I’m homesick for the life I might live in Prague, though I’ve never been to Prague.
This strange nostalgia haunts every travel photograph I see, every story I hear from friends who’ve moved abroad. I miss the version of myself who writes in European cafes, who walks cobblestone streets in winter, who speaks Czech badly but tries anyway. The specificity of the fantasy is what makes it powerful—not vague dreams of “living abroad” but concrete images: which cafe, which neighborhood, which routine would structure my imagined days.
These phantom futures feel more real than present possibilities. I can see the apartment with tall windows overlooking red roofs, light falling across a wooden desk where I work on translations or essays or whatever my Prague-self does for money. I can taste the coffee—bitter, served in small cups with too much foam. I can feel the weight of foreign coins in my pocket, the slight hesitation before I hand them to shopkeepers, never quite certain I’ve counted correctly. I can hear my footsteps echoing differently in a city built for different dreams, where the architecture itself seems to insist that life should be lived more beautifully, more deliberately, more artfully than it is in Dhaka.
The phantom life has a complete narrative. My Prague-self has friends—expatriates and locals who’ve adopted me despite my terrible accent. There’s a bar we frequent, a park where I read on weekends, a particular bridge where I walk when I need to think. This version of me is slightly more confident, slightly more cultured, fluent in the international language of cities that collect displaced people and turn them into cosmopolitans.
Why do we grieve lives we’ve never lived in places we’ve never seen?
Maybe because the self is infinite but circumstances are finite. Every choice closes doors to other selves we might have become. The version of me that stayed in Bangladesh and built a life deep-rooted in one place rather than wandering through many. The version that moved to London and became absorbed in its particular intensity, its gray skies and underground commutes and the anonymity of enormous cities. The version that teaches English in small mountain towns, learning the patience of rural life and the intimacy of communities where everyone knows everyone.
These alternate selves aren’t fantasies exactly—they’re potentials. Given slightly different circumstances, slightly different choices, any of them could have been actual. And in some quantum sense, maybe they are actual, existing in parallel universes I can almost touch during moments of acute awareness that my life could be otherwise.
Travel feeds this multiplicity by making other lives visible. When I walk through a new city, I’m not just a tourist observing—I’m auditioning for a life I might live there. Every destination becomes a stage for an unlived story, and I’m the protagonist trying on different versions of existence to see which fits. The bookshop in Edinburgh where I never worked but can imagine working, surrounded by Scottish accents and rain, becoming the kind of person who knows obscure poetry and recommends books with quiet authority. The cooking class in Tuscany I never took but can picture taking, learning to make pasta from scratch, my hands covered in flour, speaking Italian with an atrocious accent while elderly women correct my technique and my pronunciation simultaneously.
The language I never learned fluently enough to dream in—that’s perhaps the deepest grief. Because language is how we think, how we see, how we structure reality. To learn a language deeply enough to dream in it is to literally become someone else, someone who categorizes the world differently, who has access to concepts and feelings that don’t translate. Every language I haven’t learned is a self I haven’t become, a way of being human I’ve forfeited.
And the grief is real, not metaphorical. When I see photographs of Prague, I feel loss—not for a place I’ve left but for a life I never inhabited. The feeling is identical to nostalgia but inverted: instead of missing the past, I’m missing the conditional, mourning the subjunctive tense where everything exists as possibility rather than actuality.
Social media intensifies this. Every friend who moves abroad, every acquaintance posting photographs from some beautiful elsewhere, becomes evidence of paths I didn’t take. Their actual lives become mirrors for my phantom ones. They’re living in the apartment I imagined, walking streets I’ve dreamed about, becoming versions of themselves that their old selves might have grieved in the same way I grieve my Prague-self.
There’s an almost unbearable sadness in this—the recognition that every actual life excludes infinite possible ones. To choose anything is to reject everything else. To be here means not being there. To become this version of myself means all other versions die unlived, their potential forever frozen in imagination.
But maybe that’s too tragic a framing. What if homesickness for imagined futures is just love practicing for possibilities?
What if this ache—this longing for lives I haven’t lived—is actually a kind of rehearsal? My psyche trying on different futures, feeling their contours, understanding what I’m drawn to and why. The Prague fantasy isn’t random. It tells me something about what I value: beauty, history, a slower pace, European cafe culture, the romance of being slightly foreign everywhere I go. These aren’t trivial preferences; they’re clues about who I am and who I might become.
The phantom lives aren’t mocking me with their unreality. They’re teaching me what I desire, what I fear, what I believe would make me happy. Some of these fantasies might be escapist—projecting perfection onto distant places because I can’t see their complexity from here. But some might be genuine callings, real possibilities whispering that they’re worth pursuing, that the life I’m living now isn’t the only one available.
And perhaps the ability to grieve unlived lives is itself a gift—evidence of imagination, of the capacity to see beyond present circumstances, of the refusal to accept that where we are is where we must remain. The person who feels no homesickness for phantom futures might be the person who’s stopped imagining alternatives, who’s settled into their circumstances so completely that other possibilities have ceased to exist.
There’s also strange comfort in the multiplicity. Yes, I can only live one life, make one set of choices, inhabit one timeline. But in imagination, I’m unlimited. The Prague-self coexists with the London-self and the mountain-town-self and all the other selves I might have been or might still become. They’re not dead; they’re dormant, waiting in the wings, ready to step onstage if circumstances shift or courage surfaces or opportunities align.
And maybe some phantom futures are meant to remain phantom—not because they’re impossible but because their purpose is to remind us what we value, to create the contrast that makes our actual choices visible, to serve as reference points for the life we’re actively building rather than passively inhabiting.
I still look at Prague photographs with longing. Still imagine the apartment, the cafe, the cobblestone streets. But I’m starting to understand that this homesickness isn’t necessarily a command to move there. It might just be love practicing, imagination exercising, the infinite self pressing against the boundaries of finite circumstances and dreaming its way into expansion.
The grief is real. But it’s not only grief—it’s also possibility, promise, the understanding that this life, right now, is one choice among many, and that awareness changes everything. Knowing I could leave makes staying a choice. Knowing other selves exist makes this self deliberate. The phantom futures don’t haunt me—they accompany me, reminding me that I’m always becoming, always choosing, always one decision away from a completely different story.
Maybe I’ll go to Prague someday. Maybe I won’t. But the Prague-self will remain, a companion in imagination, a reminder that life is larger than any single life we lead, that the self contains multitudes even when circumstances allow only one to be actualized.
And perhaps that’s enough: to know the other lives exist, to honor them with longing, to let them teach me what I value, and then to return to this life—the actual one, the only one I’m guaranteed to have—with renewed awareness that it too was chosen, that it too contains possibilities, that this version of myself, right here, right now, is also worth inhabiting fully rather than abandoning in pursuit of phantom futures that might turn out to be just as complicated, just as finite, just as capable of generating new homesickness for other unlived elsewheres.
