#solastalgia

I am a patchwork of longing,

woven by hands I’ve forgotten,

threaded with whispers of ash and stars.

A moonlit wound glows within my chest,

its light neither of warmth nor solace,

but a beacon for ghosts

that circle and circle, taunting, endlessly.

I long to break free

to scatter my spirit

like fireflies in a night too dark to name,

to let the raven carry my shadow

to the edges of what could be.

But here I remain,

a still-life of solastalgia,

waiting for the earth to turn softer,

me and my siblings grew up mixed-race- par korean, part white. not speaking our heritage language, occasionally feasting on galbi or kimchi jjigae or (my favorite) mul naengmyeon, reading picture books with the faint outlines of korean history, without much context. sometimes the more korean side of the family, still in california, would visit. photos of very young me in a hanbok- i grew out of it, and we never got a bigger size. i started thinking of myself as more and more white as i went to high school and college, and a few times my mom had to remind me i still look korean to outsiders. growing up with a ghost of a korean identity.

this left holes in the composite identity i eventually cobbled together- holes i filled with other things, other interests and experiences, but still when some people look at my exterior they expect more koreanness than i can provide.

recently i was talking to some friends who were born in china, but adopted into a white american family. it turned out we had a lot of the same complicated feelings about our identities, our place in the world. we couldn't find an exact word for this experience. there's longing, i guess, but longing is too vague, too dramatic. i don't long for my lost korean heritage- i'm not staring out rain-soaked windows watching my ancestors pass by. but i feel its absence all the same. so i coined a word:

pinostalgia.

like nostalgia, the grief over something you no longer have, and solastalgia, the grief over a home that no longer feels like home, pinostalgia (from ancient greek πίνω, "longing, desire for") is the grief over something you never had in the first place. the loss of a language, identity, place, parent, whatever that you never knew but still feel belongs to you.

We've played with terms like "climate emergency" and "climate crisis" and it made me reflect on Glenn Albrecht's term, "symbiocene: a period of human reintegration with the rest of nature".

We don't only have fear. We have awe, transformation, and love. Those are powerful too.

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