Heimwee (English: homesickness) comes from the German Heimweh, which you can translate into feeling pain (Weh) because you miss your home (Heim). But it means much more than its literal content. It is a feeling of loss towards a place and time that never existed and never will. It is a feeling, a glorification of moments and it is always partly fantasy.
That yearning for the past, that impulse to return, flares up at the sight of images. Images that seem to idealize the past, moments that have been captured forever but at that time went by just as quickly as this very moment, you are reading this sentence. Time is continuous and unstoppable. Yet it allows itself to be captured. In retrospect, certain recollections take on such disproportionate forms that they have little to do with what actually transpired. So what does this distortion become? It becomes a feeling of loss, but one you can’t pinpoint and one which is always under the surface. Time, after all, stops for no one.
