Hiraeth by Sean Dolan

The father watches his children leave on a boat bound for Wales, and he carries with him this miraculous feeling of joy, a tangible entity with structure and shape, the size of a lemon, sticky and sweet, and as he watches his offspring wave goodbye, headed far away to a place he doesn’t understand, a country with people he has never met and songs he has not heard and streets he will never aimlessly wander, he begins to cry, feels the rising and falling of his chest, the swelling in his throat, and the thought of all this makes him feel strange, because the people he is letting go of are going on to something new, somewhere that will challenge them and make them feel whole in unnamable ways, like when his son will watch the distant orange glow of a sunset far from home, a moment so foreign and bittersweet and filled with untamable joy that he will forget about his sister, who by then has made her way to Spain, where in Madrid she will kiss a face so soft she will forget about God, or America, or the way it feels to want something you cannot have, and pondering about these endeavors only makes him feel stranger, because he can no longer hold them in his hands, he can no longer watch them change, and now this tiny ball of joy he carries with him grows needles that poke and pry, probing the spaces of skin he least expects, the places where no one dares to look, and now the sun is setting and waves are crashing against the white bed of rocks underneath his feet and the birds flying above his head are squalling and drumming and whistling and the boat is now far away and his children are now only small specks on the horizon, the boat only a blip on the landscape, a hazy white dot headed in the opposite direction, which eventually becomes too small to make out any shape or size, so instead of thinking about the boat and the two people he loves most, he turns his attention to the area in between the water and the sky, that infinite liminal space, and no matter how long he stares, no matter how much he squints his aging eyes, he cannot decipher the exact moment the boat sails into oblivion. 

Sean Dolan is a fiction writer, teacher, and bartender. His stories have appeared in Hobart, 805 Lit + Art, and elsewhere. Originally from Missouri, he now lives in The Pacific Northwest, where he is an MFA Candidate at Western Washington University. 

3 December 2021