The Poets Ache Of Elsewhere

There are mornings… quiet, barely lit… when I wake with an ache that doesn’t belong to flesh or memory. It is not the usual tangle of pain from chronic health issues that nests in my joints like a storm set to repeat, nor the heavy dullness in my limbs that clings like wet wool. This ache is older. Stranger. It pulses behind my ribs, as if my soul itself is homesick. But not for a place I’ve left behind… for a place I’ve never been.

It is a hunger for somewhere else.

Some call it wanderlust, a quaint word that makes it sound charming… like a fancy or a hobby. But this is not whimsy. This is not about vacationing or checking off destinations on a list curated for envy. No. What stirs inside me is not a passing desire… it is a feral, desperate need. A trembling at the edge of myself. A knowing that somewhere out there, beyond the fences, the walls, the red lights and routines, there might exist a place where I can finally breathe without guilt. A life that fits.

But here I am. Still. Stuck. In a city that feels like it’s pressing inward from all sides. Watching the world continue without me, like a film I’m not allowed to star in. I scroll. I sigh. I disappear in thought. And I ache.

It’s not just that I want to travel. It’s that I’ve never fully felt that I belonged anywhere, and I keep hoping that if I walk far enough, long enough, I might stumble into a place… or a moment… that feels like home. I imagine rounding some sleepy street corner and finding a crooked bookstore that smells like stories and sleep. There would be a tabby cat on the counter and a mug with my name already on it. Or I’d stand on the edge of some wild, wind-kissed cliff, and the sea would murmur something like: “You made it. We’ve been waiting.”

That’s what the ache whispers to me. That home is not necessarily a structure… it’s an exhale. A moment of recognition. A click. The sound of the universe making space for you. The scent of your own soul catching up.

Instead, I sit at the edge of my bed, staring at socks on the floor, dishes in a sink, dust on some shelves, things i sometimes romanticize but not consistently… this life often feels all at once overwhelming and underwhelming. Too loud, yet numbing. Too full of tasks, yet hollow. I push through the day in a body that screams and a mind that splinters, praying the ache stays quiet enough to let me function.

My pain… both the visible and invisible… rarely earns attention. It doesn’t wear bandages or beep in monitors. And if I tried to explain the thousand ways it manifests, I’d sound melodramatic, or worse… unbelieved. But the truth is that it is, in its own morbid way, poetic. Some mornings I feel like a dying flower trying to bloom through concrete… still reaching, still straining toward something warm, even as my petals curl from rot and weather. My body is a traitor. My thoughts, saboteurs. And my heart… oh, my heart is a wildfire no one dares approach, least of all myself.

Layered atop this chaos is the longing. Not just for beauty. Not just for movement. But for magic. For immersion in lives and landscapes beyond what I know. For salt air and strange languages. For spices I have yet to even try that sing on my tongue and less-seen yet magnificent rivers that don’t know my name. I ache for moments that feel unscripted. Alive. Sacred.

It hurts. My God, it hurts. Not metaphorically, not abstractly… but physically. Like a fist made of light pressing into my sternum. Like a scream caught behind my teeth, turning to ash. Like my entire nervous system is tuned to the frequency of a place I’ve never seen but somehow remember. And when I try to explain this, sometimes people look at me like I’ve spoken a foreign language. They smile, nod politely, and quickly change the subject. The blank stares say it all: they don’t understand what it is to cry over the desire to fly places. To grieve the absence of meadows you’ve only seen on tv or phone screens. To feel pulled, magnetized, haunted by the possibility of somewhere else… yet shackled by lack of money, chronic illness, fear, and obligation.

They don’t know what it’s like to tear up while scrolling through photos of Kyoto at twilight, Prague at Christmas, a sleepy Moroccan village at dawn, Suloszowa Poland that looks like a rural painting, or the lush green and rugged Mountain Kingdom in Lesotho Africa on a sunny afternoon… and feel as though you’ve brushed against a former version of yourself. Like part of you lives there still, just waiting. And you… tethered and tired… can’t get back to her.

And God, the sorrow of it. The particular grief that comes with not just yearning, but being fundamentally unable to pursue that yearning. Wanting so much more than your body, budget, or bandwidth will allow. Watching your own life narrow while your dreams expand. That is a quiet kind of violence. A beautiful kind of ache. Sometimes I wonder if I’m punishing myself with these daydreams. I sit and watch videos of train rides through Scotland. I listen to the wind of New Zealand. I trace Google Maps like they’re love letters. I learn bits of French and Japanese and Icelandic… not because I’ll use them, and not like I can retain the memory of the words (I just hope I do), but because it makes the ache gentler. More romantic. Like it might be preparing me for a life I’m meant to live later.

And still, I stay here. In the same zip codes. In the same familiar rooms. In the same skin that has betrayed me a thousand times over. Some days I swear the walls lean closer. The mirrors sharpen. The clocks and calendars mock. The ghosts settle into the furniture. And I whisper to a version of me I’ve never met… the one who runs barefoot through rice fields or buys fruit from street vendors with sun on her shoulders. The one who sings loudly in languages she doesn’t fully know. Who dances in festivals and drinks in foreign alleyways and never apologizes for her joy. I miss her. I miss her like a mother misses a child she never got to raise. I miss her and we never even fully met.

But I also know that even if I got on a plane, even if I booked the room and packed the bag, the pain would come too. Chronic illness isn’t bound by location. Mental health doesn’t recognize a change of scenery as sanctuary. The ache I carry may not disappear… but maybe it would soften. Maybe I would meet myself there, in the movement. Maybe in the act of going, I’d remember who I was before I learned to stay small.

That’s why I believe in motion… not as escape, but as resurrection.

There’s something sacred in being small, I think. Not small like unworthy. Not small like silenced. But small like reverent. Like a part of something vast and humming and entirely indifferent to your to-do list. I want to stand at the base of gigantic green mountains and remember I don’t need to perform to be real. I want to sit by unfamiliar seas and let my grief dissolve into something older than language. I want to be dwarfed by cathedrals and ancient trees and sky. I want to be insignificant in the most beautiful way possible.

There is madness in this longing. It’s a fever. And maybe that’s why it sears so badly… because I’m already burning. From the pain. From the memories. From the tension between what I’ve survived and what I still hope for. But I’ll take this burn over numbness. I’ll take this hunger over apathy. Because this ache proves I still believe in more.

Even when I don’t feel strong. Even when I cry over loneliness due to my husband working so much and broken appliances that we can barely afford to replace. Even when my wrists feel too pained to hold even a book due to typing out my thoughts and feelings so often. Even when I am so exhausted that silence roars. I believe there is a beach with black sand where I will finally sleep well. A foggy hillside where I will laugh so hard I forget the year. A narrow alleyway where I will kiss my husband for hours like the world is ending.

I believe in that.

Sometimes, when the ache is too much, I close my eyes and pretend I’m already gone. I picture a train winding through mountains. A window seat. A sweater I bought in a market. My husband sleeping beside me. My camera warm in my hands. No signal. No noise. Just the soft, rhythmic hum of motion and a stillness inside me I’ve never known. In those moments, the pain fades to a background buzz. As if it too is listening to possibility.

I think there are others like me… quiet, aching wanderers who dream in GPS coordinates and feel a little out of sync with the world around them. We carry invisible maps in our chests. We fall in love with cities we’ve never touched. We weep at the idea of being free… not because we aren’t allowed to be, but because we don’t know how. Because something in us is always running, even when we can’t stand.

We are not lost. We are built differently. Calibrated to a frequency others cannot hear. We are not broken. We are just… untethered.

Maybe one day I’ll go. Maybe my husband and I will find the strength, the money, the softness required to carry both our aches and pains and DREAMS across borders. Maybe I’ll sing in foreign cafes and write books under banyan trees and learn to rest without shame while my husband befriends men his age and they spar or talk of books they read. Maybe I’ll find a town that feels like a warm scarf. Maybe we will send postcards that say, “I made it,” to loved ones or even no one in particular.

Or maybe we won’t go. Maybe my body will hold me here. Maybe the math won’t work. Maybe the timing never aligns. But even so, I want to believe I could. That belief… more than anything… keeps me breathing. The faith in a someday, a somehow, a place not yet reached.

This longing is not a luxury. It is a lifeline. It is a thread I grip when everything else falls away. It is the soft gasp of hope that escapes my chest when the world is darkest. It is the candle I light inside myself, whispering: keep searching. Keep looking up. There is more. There is always more.

And maybe… just maybe… the ache itself is not a curse, but a prayer.

Maybe this longing is holy.

Maybe that, too, is enough.

And maybe… just maybe… that means I am already on my way.

But above all, I am a poet.

And poets who do not travel are like violins strung too tightly in a room with no windows… every note a strangled echo, every line a shadow of what it could have been. To write without moving is to breathe through gauze. We need the chaos of marketplaces and the silence of old stone. We need unfamiliar rain on our skin, foreign soil beneath our soles, voices we’ve never heard and sunsets that don’t belong to our hemisphere. We need to know the way a cathedral smells in winter and the strange, sweet comfort of a language we barely understand being spoken in a bakery at dawn.

Poets… true poets… cannot live on routine.

We are not meant for sameness. The muse does not come softly into beige rooms. She comes roaring in on monsoon winds and train whistles, on ferry horns and church bells or prayer calls, or the laughter of children playing in alleyways a continent away. The muse is not domestic. She is not polite. And if you try to cage her within the confines of bills and traffic and the fluorescent flicker of another sleepless night in your hometown, she will go quiet. She will leave you. And then what are you? A vessel still full of feeling but robbed of sound. A dancer in a straitjacket. A singer without air.

It is agony to have a heart tuned to the rhythms of the natural elements of this world, and yet be stranded. Trapped. Shackled by finances and chronic pain,  the punishing arithmetic of survival and the limits of a money-hungry society that just feels hauntingly unnatural and there is no way someone as small as me can end something so shackling and suffocating. It is a silent kind of grief to watch your peers sip wine on balconies in Florence on social media while your dinner comes from a microwave in a second-hand food storage container with a lid that won’t shut all the way. It’s a particular kind of sorrow to write poems about places you’ve never seen while knowing… deeply and intimately… that those places might have saved you.

Because it’s not a matter of preference. It’s a matter of preservation. The poet who cannot move will eventually rot. And no one talks about it. No one wants to admit how many of us are starving… not for food, but for motion. For beauty. For breath. There are worlds drowning and rotting deep inside of us. Beauty decaying beneath the weight of dreams clinging to our souls.

The world tells us to be grateful. To sit quietly with our dreams and make do. But what they don’t understand is that this isn’t about luxury. This isn’t about palm trees and cocktails. This is about needing something wild and profound to burn through the fog of our depression. To spark something divine inside our breaking bodies. I don’t want five-star resorts… I want stories. I want to write lines that smell like lemongrass and honeysuckle, lines that drip with the sweat of a Havana summer, echoing with the bells of Andalusian churches. I want to meet a poem halfway across the globe and say, “There you are… I’ve been waiting.”

And yet I sit. Like so many poets before me. Stuck. Not because I lack imagination or drive, but because imagination is not currency. Feelings do not cover airfare. Talent does not rent a room.

This is where the wound becomes political.

We romanticize the struggling artist. We fetishize the idea of the starving poet, candlelit and tragic. But the truth is far uglier. There is nothing poetic about unpaid bills. Nothing noble about missing medical care. There is no glory in watching your spirit shrivel because you can’t afford the cost of your own aliveness. That’s not romantic… it’s ruinous.

And I am tired of pretending otherwise.

I have seen brilliance in poverty. I have heard entire universes spill from the mouths of poets who have never left their state, not because they don’t want to… but because poverty tied stones to their ankles before they ever knew what flight felt like. And still they write. Still they sing. But my God, what could they have become if given the chance to wander?

What might I have written, if I’d tasted the rain in Dublin or kissed someone under Tokyo’s lanterns? What might I have discovered inside myself if I’d gotten to walk the Camino de Santiago or stand beneath the Aurora with no phone, no plan, no pain pills in my purse?

I will never know.

And that unknowing deeply haunts me.

Because poetry is not just something I do… it is the marrow of me. It is how I digest the world, how I metabolize heartache and hunger and hope. But lately… I fear my pages are drying. Not from a lack of love, but from a lack of stimulus. I have pressed my face against this same window for years now, watching the seasons recycle and my dreams recede. I cannot keep writing about rooms I hate. I cannot keep drawing from a well that’s gone to dust.

I need wind. I need wonder.

But in this culture, wonder is expensive. And I am not independently wealthy. I do not have the luxury of last-minute flights or month-long residencies or an escape hatch built into my inheritance. What I have is pain, and poetry. And an unshakeable belief that I was born for more than this dream-killing city and its soft gray cage.

I believe poets are cartographers of the soul. We chart emotions that haven’t been named yet. We map the sacred and the sorrowful. But how can I draw the topography of awe when I’ve never seen the Himalayas? How can I write a metaphor for abundance when I’ve never stood in a market where the fruit is still warm from the sun it grew under?

Don’t tell me to write about what I know. What I know is scarcity. What I know is exhaustion. What I know is the sound of a world just out of reach, singing to me like a siren while my feet stay stuck in cement.

There is a violence in being this alive, this aware, this emotionally porous… and yet this contained.

To be a poet who cannot travel is to live in half-measures. To survive on secondhand sunsets and the borrowed scent of someone else’s adventure. And still, we are asked to be grateful. To “make it work.” As if gratitude alone can replace the spiritual awakening that comes from standing in a place so holy it knocks the breath from your chest. As if adapting to scarcity is the same as being content.

It is not.

Let me say it clearly: it is not enough. Not for me. Not for any poet who feels the gnawing ache of stories left unwritten in cities they’ve never walked. We are starving for experience. Not because we are indulgent… but because we are built to notice. To absorb. To distill.

And what happens when you strip a poet of sensation? When you lock her away from the symphony of the world? You silence the very thing that might have healed you. Because make no mistake… our poems are not just for us. They are mirrors. Bridges. Medicines. If we cannot go, we cannot write. If we cannot write, we cannot give.

So yes… I ache. But not only for myself. I ache for all the poets scrolling through reels of Turkish sunrises and Chilean tides with tears in their eyes. I ache for the kids scribbling affirmations in tenement hallways. I ache for the elder poets whose voices have gone unheard because they never had the money to travel where their stories begged to be born.

It is not weakness to want more. It is not selfish to long for something sacred. It is not delusional to believe that a change of landscape might just save your life.

It is poetry. In its most raw, relentless form.

And maybe that’s the point. Maybe this ache… this hunger… is not the enemy, but the engine. Maybe it’s not meant to be cured, but carried. Maybe the ache is how I know I’m still alive. Still attuned. Still dreaming in technicolor even when the world offers me grayscale.

So I will keep writing. I will write as though I have walked the Great Wall at midnight. I will write as though I have danced in the deserts of Rajasthan. I will write the sea into my poems until it weeps and rushes toward me. And if I never go… if I never board the train, never find the money, never escape this aching geography… I will still write. Because that is what poets do.

We carry the ache.

We turn it into scripture.

We let it eat us alive and call it art.

But still, I hope.

I hope for the open road. I hope for the markets and the museums and the mountains. I hope for a life that feels bigger than what I’ve been handed. And I hope that someday, when I do finally stand in a city whose name I once whispered like a prayer, I will recognize myself. Not as a tourist. Not as a visitor. But as someone who has finally come home… not to a place, but to a possibility. More friends. More family. More possibilities.

Because that, after all, is what poetry is.

Not just language. Not just rhythm or rhyme.

Poetry is possibility.

And mine is waiting. Somewhere out there. Just beyond this ache.