Coming Home to your City of Dreams

Karla Delgado, a creative writing teacher at the Ateneo de Manila is one of the featured literary writers in Ruel del Vera's Connecting Flights, an Anvil publication 1^st printed in 2009 about Filipinos writing from elsewhere in the world.

Karla writes about her revisit to her favorite city, Barcelona in Spain where she studied in high school. She compares the experience with Philippines cities like Baguio where she grew up and in Manila where she is currently staying.

She describes her visit as a spiritual renewal recharging from the drudgery doing chores as a mother and teacher in Manila. Concluding her short essay, she reveals her insight when it was time for her to leave. She shared, she "discovered a place of tears, a spring of wellness where it allowed her to face the fear that lurked within about crossing into a parallel reality."

Just like us travelers, we have our own city of dreams, a place which allowed us to be ourselves laveshing us with all its resources for our appreciation. It could be our hometown or our summer destination or a memorable mountain or a nature spot. 

In my case, rich memories suddenly surge back when I revisit the UP Diliman Campus, the UP Los Banos open fields, Basco in Batanes, Dumaguete in Negros, Tuguegarao in Cagayan, Sagada in Mt. Province, Kabayan in Benguet to name a number of memorable domestic places. Recalling these moments, I can resonate to how it is to come back home to, borrowing the writer's lines, "thousands of kilometers away from Manila, I have come home to myself." For it is in breathing these places, we come to better appreciate who we are.

Read the essay or get the book.

Karla P. Delgado, "Breathing Barcelona," in Connecting Flights, Filipinos Write from Elsewhere ed. Ruel S. De Vera, 95-100.  Manila: Anvil, 2010