Homesick for Places We’ve Never Touched
There’s a photograph on my phone I’ve never taken: sunset over Santorini, white buildings cascading toward impossible blue. I know exactly how the wind would feel against my face, how the salt air would taste, how my heart would race as I watched the sun dissolve into the horizon.
I’ve never been to Greece.
This is the strange archaeology of the modern soul—we’re homesick for places we’ve only seen in pixels, nostalgic for experiences that exist only in our carefully curated imagination. We carry museums of never-lived moments, detailed as childhood memories but built from borrowed images and inherited dreams.
The coffee shop owner in our neighborhood returned from Italy last month with stories that made my chest ache. Not from envy, but from recognition. He described the narrow streets of Rome, the weight of history in the morning light, the particular loneliness of being moved to tears by beauty in a language you don’t speak. As he talked, I realized I’d been there too—in dreams, in photographs, in the way I’d stared at European films and felt my soul stretch toward something unnamed.
Why do we feel homesick for places our bodies have never touched?
Perhaps because the self is not confined to geography. Perhaps our souls are more traveled than our passports suggest. Every time we’ve felt deeply moved by a landscape in a film, every time we’ve closed our eyes and felt ourselves walking through cherry blossoms in Kyoto or hearing church bells in Prague, we’ve actually been there. Not physically, but in the way that matters most.
The neuroscientists say our brains can’t distinguish between vividly imagined experiences and real ones. The same neural pathways fire when we remember Paris and when we dream of Paris. So maybe nostalgia for never-visited places isn’t strange at all. Maybe it’s evidence that we’re bigger than our biographies suggest.
I think about the places Happy mentions wanting to see—the Northern Lights, the lavender fields of Provence, the floating markets of Thailand. She describes them with such precision, such longing, that I wonder if she’s remembering them rather than imagining them. Her eyes get that particular softness that comes from touching something beautiful, even if that touching happens entirely in the landscape of the heart.
There’s a theory that we’re nostalgic for ancestral landscapes—that something in our DNA remembers the African savanna, the smell of woodsmoke, the sound of water running over stones. Maybe our longing for distant places is just the echo of journeys our great-great-grandparents made, their restless spirits whispering through our blood: “You were made for more sky than this.”
Tonight I’ll probably scroll through travel photographs again, feeling that familiar ache for places I’ll likely never afford to see. But I won’t call it sadness anymore. I’ll call it proof that the human heart is infinite—capable of loving landscapes it’s never walked through, missing places it’s never left, coming home to dreams it’s never lived.
What if nostalgia for the unseen is just love practicing for eternity?
