Ever since I left the Army, I have felt a sense of something I struggle to even find the words for. It was not a sense of loss, because loss is related to something tangible, something one can clearly say was here at one point and gone at another. It was like nostalgia, the feeling or desire for a place or time previously or things as they once were. But I am not naive enough to mistake this for true nostalgia, because I knew what I felt I longed for had not even really been there to begin with.
Can someone have nostalgia for a time that never was? The closest word for what I felt is probably sehnsucht, a German compound word that mixes together concepts of loss and addiction with the idea of the unattainable or unknowable. In a sense, it is that nostalgia for a place that never–or may never have–existed.
