Saudade

Yes, I am working ahead on these hybrid chunky pages.  This idea for my own page came to me quite quickly.  My theme is "Pleasure & Pain."  There is a beautiful portuguese word that encompasses both of these emotions.  The word is "saudade."

There is no English translation for saudade, but it has been described as a feeling of longing for something that one is fond of which is gone but might return in a distant future.  It relates to feelings of melancholy and fond memories of things, people, days gone by.  It is sadness coupled with a paradoxical joy derived from acceptance of fate and the hope of recovering or substituting what is lost by something that will either fill the void or provide consolation...a universal feeling related to love which occurs when two people are in love but apart from each other.  Saudade occurs when we are thinking of a person whom we love and we are happy about having that feeling, but he or she is out of reach, making us sad and crushing our hearts.  The pain and these mixed feelings are saudade.

Saudade has been described as "the love that remains" after someone is gone.  It is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now trigger the senses and makes one live again.  It can be described as an emptiness, like someone or something that should be there in a particular moment is missing, and the individual feels this absence.  It brings sad and happy feelings all together, sadness for missing and happiness for having experienced the feeling.