suadade

I learned a new word today: Suadade.

It is a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia.  And while it is challenging for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs*,  it is exhilarating to discover a word  thats so accurately pairs language and feelings. Suadade.

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It is difficult to speak accurately, or justly, about our trip last spring. I tried. Several times. But our four weeks abroad have grown more significant (as some events are want to do) the farther they receed into our past. It was not just a pleasant or agreeable time, nor was it merely magnificent. But it grew us, in  ways that make us now feel more whole. More certain of ourselves and, somehow, at the same time more peaceful and confident in our uncertainty. 

Husband was inked yesterday. Which is to say, he gained two more small images on his upper arms. These tattoos are two sketches of mountains. The first, a depiction of the peak we hiked in Switzerland, a copy of this photo that I captured on our climb. The second is a cloudy image from Skye. A symbol of the hike he and I embarked upon together. One of the best and most significant days we've spent in the seven years since we first met. 

He came home last night, elated.

Yet now we are feeling nostaligic, filled with longing. 

The suadade of past adventures is hurting my heart. 

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In the end, the solution to this melancholy is (as always) equal parts pizza and wine. A walk around the neighborhood in the crisp, evening air, then a few episodes on Netflix, together tucked beneath the same throw blanket (because to each have our own seems, at this point, unnecessary).

We talk about the mountains and trains and everything we ate in Europe. As we sit, I worry that the house is too cold and he says, here, you can have the whole blanket. 

I heat a pot of apple cider on the stove and we search the pantry for cinnamon sticks. Apple cider is Pennsylvania is never as good as cider in New York, he says (which is something he says every October). And then we are back seven years, back to freshman year, stirring powdered packets of cider mix into luke-warm, dorm-room water, and I think, well, we have come such a long, long way since then. 

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* taken brazenly from Thomas Hardy