On growing up Albanian, losing the thread back, and learning to grieve the places and people we can never fully return to.
By Kamela Qirjo
There is an ache that has no perfect translation, except that someone, long ago, tried. They called it nostalgia. From nostos , the return home, and algos , pain. Two ancient words. Not a fondness for the past. Not mere wistfulness. A longing so deep it lives in the body. The particular suffering of someone who longs to go home and cannot.
I have lived in America for twenty-eight years. I have built a life here, a full one. And yet no city, no street, no neighborhood has ever settled into my bones the way Korça did. The city in southeastern Albania where I was born, where I learned the texture of the world, the smell of the air, the sound of neighbors, the rhythm of days, is still, after nearly three decades, the only place that has ever felt like home.
I left at ten years old. I spent three more summers there, at twelve, thirteen, fourteen, summers that were a gift and a complication at once. Old enough to drink it all in, young enough to have no say in leaving. Each August, boarding a plane back to America felt like a small grief I had no language for yet.
No city or place here has ever felt like home. I have lived in America for twenty-eight years. And yet.
Then, at fourteen, the summers stopped. Not for my brother, he continued going until he was eighteen, growing up with one foot in each world, deepening his roots in the place we both came from. But for me, as a girl entering adolescence, my father made a different decision. He wanted to be present during those years. He thought he was protecting me.
He was not wrong to love me. But the consequence of that love was the severing of something I have spent a lifetime quietly mourning. My brother got four more summers of Korça. I got four more summers of American loneliness, long, empty days in a country that never felt like mine, watching from a distance as the place that made me kept living without me.
What Home Actually Is
We talk about home as if it is simply a place. An address. A country of origin. But home is not a location, it is a felt sense. It is built in the body during the earliest years of life, when the brain is quietly mapping what safety, belonging, and comfort feel like. The light at a particular time of day. The sound of a language spoken without effort. The smell of a kitchen. The slow ritual of an evening coffee shared with people you love.
For Albanian children who grew up between two worlds, that felt sense often got formed somewhere that was then taken away. And nothing in the new country, no matter how many years pass, no matter how well one adapts, ever quite overwrites the original.
This is not pathology. It is not failure to integrate. It is simply what happens when the nervous system learns home in one place and is then asked to accept another. The body remembers what the mind tries to move on from.
Home is not a location. It is a felt sense, built in the body during the earliest years of life, when the brain is quietly mapping what safety and belonging feel like.
As an adult, I have found my way back to something adjacent. I spend my summers in Europe, drawn instinctively to the pace of life that America never offered me. The slow coffee meant to be savored over conversation, not gulped on a commute. Meals that are events rather than fuel. Boulevards designed for people to simply be in them. Evenings that linger. Time that moves differently.
It is not Korçë. But it is closer. And the instinct that keeps pulling me back to Europe every summer is the same one that formed in a small Albanian city before I had words for any of it.
She Was Home Too
I did go back to Korçë in my twenties. Several times. And each time, the moment I arrived, something in me exhaled, the way your body releases a breath it has been holding without you realizing it. The streets, the light, the air. It was all still there. And so was she.
My grandmother. The woman who helped raise me. Who was woven into my earliest understanding of what it means to be loved, to be cared for, to belong somewhere completely. When I was a child in Korçë, she was part of the fabric of the place. And when I returned as a young woman, she was the reason returning felt like more than just visiting a city. She was the reason it felt like going home.
I did not fully understand this until she was gone.
Because when I lost her, I stopped going back. Not consciously, not all at once, but gradually, the returns stopped. And it took me time to understand why. It was not that I had fallen out of love with Korça. It was that Korça and my grandmother had always been the same thing in my heart. The place and the person were so intertwined that one could not exist, for me, without the other. To return without her would be to walk into her absence at every corner. In her kitchen. On her street. In the chair where she used to sit.
I did not lose just a place. I also lost the person who made the place feel like home. And I have not known how to go back since.
And so, I have maintained, quietly and without quite naming it, a gentle illusion. She is not gone. She is simply far away. As she always was, across an ocean, waiting. As long as I do not go back and feel her absence everywhere I look, I can keep her there, present, near, just out of reach but not lost.
This is what grief does when it is too large to hold all at once. It finds a way to stay manageable. The distance of an ocean becomes a mercy. And the longing for Korça becomes a way of staying close to her without having to face what returning would confirm.
Keeping the Thread Alive
I am ready now. Not because the grief is gone, it will not be gone. But because I have a five-year-old son, and I want him to see where I grew up. I want to show him Korçë through my eyes. I want him to feel, even once, what I have spent a lifetime trying to describe and carrying quietly inside me.
And I want to bring her with me, in the only way I still can, in the stories I will tell him as we walk those streets. In the way I will point to a doorway or a square and say, your great-grandmother walked here. She loved this place. She loved us. In carrying her memory into the next generation, I am refusing to let her disappear entirely.
There is something quietly revolutionary in this. In choosing to take your child to the place that formed you, you refuse to let the thread be cut completely. You do for them what circumstances did not fully allow to be done for you, you give them roots, a sense of origin, an understanding that they come from somewhere with depth and beauty and history.
My grandmother loved Korçë. I love Korçë. And soon, a child who carries her blood will walk those same streets.
That is not the end of a story. That is how a story continues.
If you are an Albanian immigrant, or the child of one, if you have ever felt the particular ache of a home you cannot fully return to, of a person so bound to a place that losing them meant losing the place too, I wrote this for you.
The longing you carry is not weakness. It is not failure to adapt. It is evidence of how deeply you were loved, and how deeply you loved back. That kind of love does not require justification. It only asks to be witnessed.
You are allowed to grieve what was taken. You are allowed to miss what was left behind. And you are allowed, when you are ready, to go back, not to recover what was lost, but to honor it. To let the grief be real. To stand in the place that made you, in the absence of the person who made it home, and say, I was here. She was here. This was home. I carry it still.
Written from my own lived experience, and offered with love to every Albanian heart that has ever ached for home, and for the people who made it one.
Author: Kamela Qirjo
Kamela Qirjo, MA, LPCC, NCC, is a Denver-based licensed psychotherapist, founder of Iliria Therapy & Consulting, and a Harvard-Certified Executive Coach. A first- generation Albanian immigrant, Kamela’s work is deeply shaped by her lived experience, clinical training, and commitment to emotional honesty, relational healing, and the complexities of identity, culture, and belonging. She specializes in psychodynamic therapy, trauma-informed care, relationship dynamics, men’s mental health, and the emotional patterns that shape how we love, lead, protect ourselves, and connect with others. Through both her clinical work and writing, Kamela explores the unseen stories we carry—and how healing begins when we are willing to understand them with depth, compassion, and accountability.
