When Elsewhere Calls: The Unearned Nostalgia

It doesn’t always begin with a book. Sometimes it’s a movie, a photograph, or even a line from a poem. Tonight, it’s a flashback of the summer I turned seven. We were three kids from the South Bronx chasing chickens on a mountain farm in central Puerto Rico. We never caught those chickens, but that memory still follows me. We were sweaty, barefoot, dirty, louder than the roosters, and even at seven I knew Morovis would always have a piece of me, holding a place in its mountains for when I found my way back.

At other times, the ache for elsewhere is for a place my feet have never touched. Yet somehow, that place already lives in my thoughts. It feels like a missing piece of a puzzle, waiting to make me whole. Born of imagination, not memory, it is a nostalgia for the unknown. A longing for a light I have never seen falling across rooftops I can almost picture. I see me on a cool mountain, feeling the breeze on my face, peeling an orange, listening to birds speak in a language I will never understand.

Narrow alleys of Chefchaouen, paddy fields of Ubud, a vineyard in Nájera – they linger in my thoughts like half-remembered dreams. I don’t know why they call to me. Maybe it’s the sound of their names, maybe the promise of color. It could be the hope that somewhere else we will find the part of ourselves that stays just out of reach. Maybe the human heart simply needs a horizon.

Why do we long for places we’ve never seen? Perhaps it’s for the breaking of routine and the lure of escape. Daily life can be monotonous and stressful. When routine presses in, the wondering grows, and I feel the sunlight over Granada’s tiled courtyards.

Sometimes, what we seek is not adventure but understanding. The longing can be for finding connection, perspective, and humility. Movies, photos, and travel blogs invite us to see the world as layered and alive. They can awaken empathy and help us appreciate that other lives are just as real and sacred as our own. We yearn for the chance to stand in someone else’s everyday.

The pull toward elsewhere is, in many ways, a journey inward. I, myself, am searching for a sense of belonging, a place that feels like home. I feel like I have an incomplete personal and cultural heritage. In Spain, I have walked through old streets wondering if my lineage passed through them before it reached the Caribbean. While swinging on la hamaca in Puerto Rico, I envisioned an ancestor tying their hammock to the same tree. Those moments weren’t only about uncovering where I come from, but also about recognizing how those places continue to live within me. Maybe that is what nostalgia for the unknown truly means, a lingering desire not just for distant lands, but for the missing parts of ourselves we hope to find along the way.

Sometimes when we finally reach the places we’ve pined for, we find they do not feel or look exactly as imagined. That doesn’t make the dream wrong. It means the dream did its job. It carried us forward, across oceans and into ourselves. And sometimes, imagination itself is enough. To dream of a place is to feel alive in two worlds at once, the one you stand in and the one that waits beyond the edge of your knowing. Reading, dreaming, planning, even yearning, all of it is travel in its own way.

Maybe that’s the secret, to live with the wanderlust. To let it remind us there is always more to see, more to feel, more to understand. Travel will happen when it’s meant to. Until then, we can keep listening to that call from elsewhere, the one that tells us we are still becoming, still searching, still on our way home. After all, even those chickens I once chased found their way home by dusk.