hiraeth by Kevin Brown

hiraeth: n. - Welsh English; deep longing for a person or thing which is absent or lost

Photo by Billy Williams on Unsplash

​It started with a dining room table and chairs, enough for a small dinner party where we would converse about the composition of novels or maybe music or film (not movies, but film or cinema). I even bought furniture for the front room of the house I was renting, a closed-in porch that pretended to be a sunroom, but was too hot when the sun was out, too cold when the winters of Indiana settled in. Nobody ever sat on the couch, and I never occupied the chair, save for in my imagination when we moved from the table to have dessert and discussions about politics or art or other Important Issues.
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Or maybe it began when I looked through catalogs: one from public radio with shirts emblazoned with Not now, Carmen, I’m Bizet or Books: The Original Hand-Held Device and ties modeled from Frank Lloyd Wright designs or one from Levenger filled with barrister bookcases with a B chiseled into the glass and fountain pens that cost more than the engagement ring I bought for my first wife, the one who would leave before I could ever afford one shelf, even without the engraving.

I fell in love with skyscrapers and public transportation, so I traded in the mountains for a metropolis, of sorts. And now when I go home, or a place that looks like it—difficult to tell the difference—the one-fingered wave on the steering wheel that once welcomed me home has transformed into a finger flipped at a foreign entity with bumper stickers for the other side. Or maybe I’m the one who’s changed.

In “Thinking as a Hobby,” William Golding writes, “It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.” To a boy from Carter County, Tennessee, who ended up in graduate school in the Humanities, it was impossible to know what a different life could look like, so I missed a world I never had, a world where books matter more than football scores, where philosophers filled my mind more than the family I left behind. I never knew what I had lost. I never knew what I had gained. I never knew which was which.

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Kevin Brown (he/him) teaches high school English in Nashville. He has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. You can find out more about him and his work on social media sites at @kevinbrownwrites or at http://kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/