You’re in a part of town you used to live in as a teenager. You walk past the house of the girlfriend you knew when you were sixteen. You look up to what used to be her bedroom window. From the outside, everything still looks the same, though somebody else lives there now. Her parents are retired, she’s married with two small kids in another city. You feel a searing nostalgia for everything that was and no longer is. It’s not so much her you miss, more what you had, who you both were, how things looked then. It’s hard to explain what the feeling is, though it is confounding in its intensity. At that moment, your phone rings. It’s a friend – who asks how you are. You’re at a loss, you don’t quite know how to convey your emotions and after a few attempts, move on to other subjects.
Unless – that is – you speak Portuguese, because if you do, there will be no need to struggle. You will have the ideal word immediately to hand. You will simply tell your friend that you are experiencing ‘saudade’ and they will understand. The word, which has no direct translation in any other language, means a bitter-sweet melancholic yearning for something beautiful that is now gone: a love affair, a childhood home, a friendship. It’s a blend of pain at loss and pleasure that loveliness once graced our lives.
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