The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

by Diana Marcum

It had been a tumultuous week, and it occurred to me that in all levels of crisis, it is a good idea to lie down outside and look up.

There is a Portuguese word, saudade, that they say has no translation. It’s bigger than homesickness or missing someone. It’s a yearning that can be expressed in no other language.

How tenuous it is. I closed my eyes and felt myself a speck but part of a universe you can sense revolving if you just stop.

Though I again felt a connection to something huge and beyond me, I was also set loose from everything familiar. And ever since, I’ve worried that in this great swirl of connecting dots, there isn’t a dot where I belong. I feared I was doomed to free float.

place and separation and identity and figuring out what stayed put even when you didn’t.

“Here’s to nothing,” he said. “That’s when anything can happen.”

Home—it seemed like a fragile idea to me. Is it where we’re from or where we are?

We have this one life. But all the roads not taken, all those other lives we might have lived, are a part of it too. Yearning—that terrible, beautiful gaping yawn of want for a person, a place, a chance, a change, or something we can’t name—leaves craters, spaces for us to hold more of life. Saudade might be a strictly Portuguese word, but aching want is a universal condition.