that welsh word for longing. for homesickness for a place you can't return to. or maybe never existed at all.
it's the ache for something you lost. or something you never had to begin with. nostalgia but sharper. more permanent. less about memory and more about absence.
the feeling of missing a version of yourself you could have been. a life you might have lived. a home that was never really home but you miss it anyway.
it's grief without a body. longing without an object. the specific pain of knowing you can't go back because there's nothing to go back to.
not homesickness. more like the ghost of homesickness. the shape of something missing.
hiraeth is what you feel when you realize you've been looking for something your whole life and you'll never find it because it only existed in the version of the world where things went differently.