Nostomanic

After the Turn, her mother sat by the window and stared at the gray-white sky. She didn’t speak. She didn’t eat. She just waited , as if the old world might cycle back around like a lost dog.

Here is the story.

The doctors—the ones who hadn’t wandered off or forgotten their own names—called it Nostomania. A pathological homesickness for a place that no longer existed. The suffix -manic meant the obsession had teeth. Lena’s mother was nostomanic. So was the man down the street who spent his days rebuilding a bicycle that would never move. So was the woman in the library who read the same phone book aloud, year after year, because the names were a litany of the living. nostomanic

The word is nostomanic : a pathological longing for the past, a homesickness so acute it bends the present out of shape. After the Turn, her mother sat by the