lena.molby.app/essays/saudade-is-not-nostalgia
Saudade is not nostalgia
A word my neighbours use every day, and the English I keep failing to find for it.
Every guidebook says saudade cannot be translated, and then translates it as nostalgia. My neighbour Dona Graça, who is eighty-one and has lived on our street since before the revolution, says this is nonsense.
Nostalgia, she says, is wanting to go back. Saudade is carrying the thing with you. You can have saudade for a person who is in the next room. You can have it for a future that has not happened yet.
The ache that keeps you company
I have been trying, for most of a year, to find the English for that. The closest I have come is "the ache that keeps you company". It is not sadness, exactly. It is the shape a love leaves when it is not being used right now.
I feel it for London, where I grew up, and for this city, which I have not left. I feel it, oddly, for old blogs I wrote that no longer load.
Maybe that is why I built a home for my own writing. Not to go back to it. To carry it.
Lena · 25 January 2026, Lisbon