When I’m in Cambridge, it feels as though time comes to a standstill everywhere else in the world. Going home reminds me of just how wrong I am.

I’m back on Welsh soil. Home turf. Dad and I are on our final stretch of the journey home from Cambridge. As we turn off the M4 and head towards Swansea, I gaze out of the car like a wide-eyed child seeing it for the first time. I press my face against the window, letting out gasps of “Since when has that been there?” and “Is that Aldi new?”.

“It’s the same old city I grew up in, but places, like people, change and grow”

Since I left, spring has come to Swansea. The days longer, the trees budding and the sea glittering in the low sun. The building sites, with their scaffolding and cones that once littered the city, have been brushed away with winter’s remains. In what used to be an old leisure centre car park stands a brand-new, state-of-the-art digital arena - whatever that’s supposed to mean. It seems, somehow, to have risen from the ground in my short, eight weeks away. Shiny, empty offices tower over old, boarded-up shops. They too have sprouted from the soil, almost as fast as the daffodils on the other side of the road, standing tall, yellow and proud.

My hometown Swansea, in South Wales, is changing. It’s currently undergoing a £1 billion pound regeneration project, investing in new offices, transport links and more greenery in the city centre. It’s the same old city I grew up in, but places, like people, change and grow. It seems older, more mature, sophisticated even. All in the blink of a Cambridge term.

Cambridge and home feel like two planets that turn into entirely separate universes. Two planets, 256 miles, three motorways and five hours apart. Two lives, both unrecognisable to each other. Two lives, irreconcilable in my mind.

They couldn’t be more different. I speak different languages. I dress differently. I talk with different accents. I can just about get away with sounding like a Londoner in Cambridge, with only the slightest tinge of an accent occasionally slipping my cover to the Welsh ear. But at home, I can lengthen my vowels and roll my r’s to my heart’s content. In Cambridge, Sainsbury's is only a 2-minute walk away. At home, my nearest shop is a small petrol station, a 10-minute car journey away. Most of my friends are at least another half-an-hour drive, if not longer. Out of my window, the ivory towers of Pembroke College have been replaced by fields as far as my eyes can see. My only neighbours are sheep.

“I don’t see Swansea slide slowly from the depths of winter to its first days of spring”

My childhood bedroom is now home to two separate lives. Above my desk, hangs an old sixth form timetable and a calendar, still turned open to the page of September 2021. In my wardrobe, a matriculation gown hangs next to an old, penguin-patterned dressing gown. My bookshelves are a strange mix of old Jacqueline Wilson books, awkwardly strewn next to Hobbes, Weber and Arendt. Two halves of a whole.

I don’t go back home during term time. The hustle and bustle of Cambridge means I can’t seem to justify the 256-mile journey back home. But it also means that I don’t see Swansea slide slowly from the depths of winter to its first days of spring. I don’t see the new daffodils and buildings shoot up from their seeds in the ground. I don’t witness my hometown change. I can only look away, like an absent parent, mourning a suddenly grown child.

′Hiraeth’ is a Welsh word that is often deemed untranslatable in the English language. It’s similar to what the Germans call Sehnsucht, the Romanians, dor, and the Portuguese, saudade. It’s a mixture of homesickness, grief and nostalgia, a kind of yearning for Wales. But it’s more than that. It expresses an irretrievable longing for a person, place or time you can never get back to. As one writer put it, to feel hiraeth is to feel a deep incompleteness and recognize it as familiar.

As much as I want home to stay how it was when I left, Swansea changes every time each term swings past. I don’t miss Swansea when I’m away. I feel hiraeth when I return. Hiraeth for the change I wasn’t there to see. Hiraeth for a Swansea that lives only in my past.

When I’m in Cambridge, it feels as though time comes to a standstill everywhere else in the world. Perhaps a part of me wishes that it actually did.