Why do I miss my hometown but never want to go back?

Here’s how it goes, every single time.

I’m abroad, living my life, and something random sets me off. A song in a café. A smell from someone’s kitchen. A photo my cousin posts of the street where I grew up, the one with the bakery and the dodgy pavement. And suddenly I miss home so much it physically hurts. I’m on Skyscanner at midnight. I’m planning the whole trip: who I’ll see, what I’ll eat, which balcony I’ll sit on.

Then I actually go home.

Day one: heaven. I cry at the airport. Everyone feeds me. I eat like it’s my last meal on earth.

Day two: still lovely. Slightly too much food.

Day three: someone asks when I’m getting married. My old bedroom feels tiny. The bakery is now a phone shop. Everyone’s talking about people I don’t remember.

And somewhere around lunchtime, a little voice in my head goes: …when’s my flight back?

And then, the minute I’m back in my “real” life, I start missing it again.

So what is this? How can I miss a place so badly and not want to be there? Am I just a very ungrateful daughter of my hometown?

Okay, so first, a fun fact that made me feel a lot less dramatic: this feeling used to be an official medical illness.

In 1688, a Swiss medical student called Johannes Hofer wrote his dissertation about a strange disease he’d noticed among Swiss people living away from home: soldiers fighting abroad, students, servants working in other countries. They’d get sad, stop sleeping, stop eating, get fevers and heart palpitations, and in some cases seem to waste away. And there was only one cure that reliably worked: sending them home.

He needed a fancy name for it, so he smooshed together two Greek words: nostos, meaning homecoming, and algos, meaning pain. Nostalgia. Literally, “the pain of wanting to go home.”

So the word I use for watching old videos with a glass of wine was originally a diagnosis. Doctors took it so seriously that, according to Rousseau, Swiss mercenaries were at one point banned from singing a certain folk song from the Alps, because it made them so homesick they’d cry, desert, or fall ill. Imagine a song being so powerful it’s basically a weapon. That’s my mum’s voice notes.

And honestly, reading about Hofer made me feel weirdly validated. People have been sick with missing home for centuries.

I’m not being dramatic, I’m being historical.

But there’s one detail in Hofer’s cure that I think is the key to the whole thing. The cure was going home. And for those soldiers, it worked, because home was still the home they’d left. Same village, same mountains, same people, frozen in place.

My home isn’t frozen. And, more annoyingly, neither am I.

Which brings me to Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher from around 500 BC who was so famously mysterious that people called him “the Obscure.” Also “the Weeping Philosopher,” because apparently he was always a bit sad about humanity. Honestly, relatable.

We only have fragments of what he wrote, little scraps of sentences quoted by other people centuries later. (His death is also a whole thing. According to one ancient biographer, who is not exactly reliable, he tried to cure an illness by covering himself in cow dung and lying in the sun. It did not work. Please don’t try this. Back to the philosophy.)

His most famous idea, the one everyone half-remembers, goes something like this: you can’t step into the same river twice.

Because the second time you step in, the water that touched you the first time has already flowed away to the sea. It looks like the same river. It has the same name. It’s in the same place on the map. But it’s made of completely different water.

And then the second half, which people always forget: you’re not the same person either. You’ve changed since the first time.

Different water, different you.

And reading that, I was like… oh. That’s literally my trip home.

Because what do I actually miss when I’m on Skyscanner at midnight? I miss the river from before. The bakery that’s now a phone shop. My grandma’s kitchen the way it smelled when I was nine. My friends when we were seventeen and had nothing to do but walk around the same three streets. That’s what my brain is homesick for. Not the place as it is now, but the place as it was when I lived there.

And that place doesn’t exist anymore. Not because anything terrible happened to it, but because time is a river. The water moved on.

And so did I. That’s the second half that makes the trip so weird. When I go back, everyone sees me through old glasses. To my family I’m still a bit fifteen. My old bedroom still has the posters. My aunt still asks the same questions, as if the last ten years were just a long weekend. And part of me slips straight back into being that person, and part of me is going “excuse me, I pay rent in another country, I have opinions on olive oil now.”

So it’s not that I don’t love home. It’s that home and I are both different water. We’re trying to meet in a river that’s already flowed away.

Which explains why the trip feels weird. But it doesn’t explain why the missing feels so good. Why I keep going back to those memories, even though I know they’re not there anymore. Why a smell can knock me sideways.

And nobody has ever been knocked sideways by a smell more famously than a sickly French man in bed with a cup of tea.

Marcel Proust spent the last years of his life mostly in bed, in a bedroom in Paris lined with cork so no noise could get in, writing one novel. Just one. Except that novel, In Search of Lost Time, is seven volumes and well over three thousand pages long. It’s basically the longest “I miss the old days” ever written.

And the whole thing starts with a biscuit.

At the beginning, the narrator is a grown man, tired and a bit gloomy. His mum offers him some tea and a madeleine, the little shell-shaped French sponge cake. He dips a piece in the tea, puts the spoon in his mouth, and something insane happens. A wave of joy hits him, completely out of nowhere. He has no idea why. He takes another sip and tries to chase the feeling, like when you’re trying to remember a dream.

And then it lands. It’s the taste of the madeleine his aunt used to give him, dipped in tea, on Sunday mornings when he was a little boy, in the village where he spent his childhood holidays. And suddenly the whole village comes rushing back: the church, the streets, the garden, the people, all of it, “town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.”

Literally three thousand pages come out of that one bite.

What Proust noticed is that there are two kinds of memory. One is the kind you do on purpose: trying to remember, looking at old photos, listing facts. And it’s always a bit… flat. Dead, almost. The other kind ambushes you. A smell, a taste, a song in a café. And that kind brings the past back fully alive, with all the feelings attached.

Which, by the way, is exactly my midnight Skyscanner moment. I never get homesick because I decide to think about home. It’s always ambush memory. The song. The smell. The photo. A madeleine, basically.

But here’s the part of Proust that I think actually answers my question. Much later, near the end of the whole massive novel, he writes this:

“The true paradises are the paradises we have lost.”

And at the end of the first volume, he goes back to look at places he remembered from his youth, and they’re not the same. He writes that houses, roads and avenues are as fleeting, “alas, as the years.” Which is just Heraclitus with better French.

So for Proust, the home you miss isn’t a place on a map. It’s a place in time. And you can’t fly to a time. The real village of his childhood doesn’t live in the village anymore. It lives in him. In the taste of tea and cake. In memory. That’s the only place it still exists.

So. Why do I miss my hometown but never want to go back?

Here’s where I’ve landed. Hofer says the pain of missing home is real: it’s been real for centuries, it used to be a medical diagnosis, and I’m allowed to feel it. Heraclitus says I can’t go back to the home I miss, because it’s a river: it moved, and so did I. And Proust says that’s okay, because the home I miss was never really in the town. It’s in me, and it shows up whenever it wants, in a smell, a song, a cup of tea.

So the reason I want to leave on day three isn’t that I don’t love home. It’s that I went looking for a place that only exists in time. I flew all the way there and found a phone shop where my memory used to be.

And honestly, I think that’s okay. I can stop asking the trip to do something it can’t. I can go home as who I am now, not who I was. I can eat too much, laugh at my aunt’s questions, sit on the balcony, and not expect to feel seventeen again.

And when the homesickness ambushes me back here, I can do something a bit smarter than open Skyscanner. Cook the dish. Call my mum. Play the song. Dip the biscuit in the tea.

The true paradises are the ones we’ve lost. But you can still visit them. You just need a kettle, not a plane ticket.

“You just need a kettle, not a plane ticket.”