Saudade — The Portuguese word for everything that was and no longer is.

Rodrigo Lemos
Nov 3 · 4 min read

Close to the last bus stop before getting in the next one, a man slightly looks up to the 1st floor on the building he was used to living when he was a child. Deeply gazing at the cracked window glass, his eyes start to tremble, and he slowly takes a deep breath on an unsuccessful attempt to avoid his tears to drop.

He leaves the bus and runs to catch the next one while wiping away his face. Despite the fact he wants to forget what he just saw, unwillingly he carries this scene on and on with the continuous flashes that arouse on his head.

Most of them were remembrances, beginning from that cracked window, where once he cut his arm and going through older and older events which the flashes were gradually recalling: toys spread out in the living room, the trees he was used to climbing to pick sweet and sour apples, the smell of grandma’s chocolate marble cake, the hysterical laughs of old friends, family meetings, bike riding lessons his mom gave him when he was 15, and the secret meetings in his friend’s house to share the newest discoveries he had about his parents.

Sitting quietly in the last chair on the bus, he closes his eyes, starts to daydream and intensely reexperience all these events and its senses with a mix of happiness and sorrow, simultaneously. He daydreams, rebuilds these experiences and allows the mix of feelings and deep imagination to sit on all around him on remembrance of what once was and no longer can be.

He tries, however, to recreate the events imagining if we could recreate grandma’s cake, or if he could pick up apples with another friend somewhere else, renovate his favorite bike given by his mom, or even fix that cracked window. Although he knew it would not be the same or would never happen, he mixed all the events on an attempt to recreate them somehow because they were so alive inside that he had to do something with these feelings.

He remembers all these past events when a friend calls and asks how he is and how he is feeling now that it has been a year since his grandma died close to her 80 years anniversary and if he would like to rent a bike to hang out in the city cause his favorite one had to be sold 2 years ago to pay an overdue electricity bill. He accepts the invitation wishing he could also invite his best friend which now lives abroad for the past 7 years.

This man is experiencing Saudade on its soft and intense forms — a Portuguese word which has no direct translation in any other language and means a bitter-sweet melancholic yearning for something beautiful that is now gone such as a childhood home, old friendships, a love affair, smells and flavors from food cooked by loved ones. In its deepest shape it can be felt towards people and things whose whereabouts are unknown, such as a lost lover, or a family member who has gone missing, moved away, separated, or died and the love and the care of someone who is far off or dead. It is a blend of pain at loss and pleasure that loveliness once graced our lives.

The man on the bus feels a searing nostalgia for everything that was and no longer is. Then he realizes that he was missing out on a lot of what he had, who his family was and how it looked at the time, that it is still difficult for him to explain what these feelings are and why they are so confusing in their intensity. He is feeling a recollection of experiences, places, and events that once brought excitement, pleasure, and well-being, which now triggers the senses and makes one live again.

Saudade can more casually be used to say that you miss someone or something, even if you’ll see that person or thing in the near future. It differs from nostalgia in that one can feel “Saudade” for something that might never have happened, whereas nostalgia is a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or period in time.

There is a fine line between Saudade and Nostalgia. Nostalgia distorts your sense of reality making you feel that the past would have been better than the now and blocks the present to unfold on its own rhythm. Saudade, however, allow you to experience those moments and recreate them. “Matar a Saudade” (in Portuguese, “Kill the Saudade”) is used when you can recreate experiences as much as possible or simply do something that will remember those times (feeling it, crying, get in contact with the person you are missing, talking with supportive friends, writing about your feelings, etc.), and then let it all go before it turns into nostalgia.

Saudade is a good feeling but needs to be properly felt and interpreted when it comes otherwise you can be wrapped up in the endless attachment to the past provided by the nostalgia.

Have you ever felt Saudade? How can you make this feeling alive, again?

We blink our eyes and suddenly see cracked windows that no longer exist.

Rodrigo Lemos
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