You can miss a life you were glad to leave.
The apartment with the terrible heating. The job that wore you thin. The relationship you knew, even then, wasn’t right. You would never move back, and yet one afternoon a song drifts through the grocery store, and you are homesick for a place that was never good for you.
Earlier this summer, a song caught my ear, “Hey There Delilah,” and I suddenly found myself remembering my living room in Winnipeg. I loved that house. It was built in the early 1940s and had beautiful hardwood floors and the kind of touches that just don’t happen anymore: tall, bevelled wooden baseboards, chair rails, an arched entry into the living room, plaster on the walls. I had grown up in military housing and lived in contractor-white boxy apartments as an adult, so that house felt otherworldly. I filled it with enough colourful crochet blankets to conjure up Mrs. Weasley herself.
The moment that surfaced was from 2008, when I was actively blogging about sock crochet and even earning an income from AdSense. Late afternoon, light spilling through the curtains, the cats curled up with me, a new pattern nearly finished. My son came through the door, home from basketball. I was so content.
It sounds perfect, and it was, when Lord Voldemort wasn’t home. He was overseas in Afghanistan then, and I did what I always did when he left: I blossomed into the person I should be, and I stood out. Then he would come home. The noose would tighten. The surveillance would start. I would have to start hiding my tips and lying about what I got that day. “Oh, he’s so devoted!” my coworkers at the salon would say, and the cage door would shut. The manipulation followed, and later on... you know.
It’s hard on the head to remember things like that.
For a moment, I had forgotten about that part. I reached for one warm afternoon, and everything came with it.
If this feels confusing, it may help to know how common it is. Nostalgia is rarely about the life itself. It’s about what the life held: the person you were in it, the sense that everything was still ahead of you, the light in a particular room, the certainty of a routine that no longer exists. We don’t miss the situation. We miss the feeling that certain moments wrapped around us.
Tarot has a card for this. The Six of Cups is the card of memory and sweetness, the past remembered through a warm filter. It reminds us that the filter is part of the picture. Memory keeps the sweetness and sets aside the rest, though sometimes the filter slips, and the memory arrives with its shadow attached.
If your chart leans on the 2 or the 6, you may know this feeling especially well. The 2, ruled by the Moon, remembers with the body: the tides of emotion, the attachment, the way a scent can carry you years back in a breath. The 6, ruled by Venus, treasures home, beauty, and being loved, so it mourns the warmth even when the walls were cracked. If that’s you, this isn’t a flaw. It’s how you’re wired to hold on to what mattered. Not sure where your 2s and 6s live? You can find them by casting your own numeroscope at 78Numbers.com.
So instead of asking, “Why am I like this?”, try asking, “What exactly am I missing?”
For me, it wasn’t the house, though I still love it. It certainly wasn’t him. It was the woman in that late-afternoon light: creative, succeeding, unhurried, blossoming. I wasn’t homesick for the cage. I was homesick for her.
Longing can hold a happy afternoon and a locked door at the same time. It isn’t asking me to go back to either one. It’s showing me what to build.
Yours might be different. Being needed? Being young? Having no answers yet, and no one expecting any? Feeling chosen? Name it plainly. The longing usually points at something you value, not something you must go back to.
Missing a life is not a vote to return to it. It’s information. It shows you what you want more of, and most of that can be rebuilt, in smaller and kinder forms, in the life you have now.
You don’t have to go back to get it back.
If this one stirred something, your numbers may be able to tell you why. Cast your own numeroscope at 78Numbers.com and see your chart laid out with the Tarot cards that correspond to it. Or, if you’d rather talk it through with a person, you can book a reading with me.