Abrir y salir
Inside my head, I’ve built another life—a place without maps, only sensations. In this imagined world, I run barefoot, drawn instinctively toward light, water, and wind. My body responds to the elements, my mind softens, and something ancient within me begins to stir.
Slowly, those scattered sensations began to take shape. A street here, a window there. Walls rising, paths winding, light falling across stone. What started as feeling became form, until, without meaning to, I had built a city.
Over time, this city I’ve created has started to come alive whenever I speak Spanish. It breathes when I think in the language—not as a means of translation, but as something more elemental, more embodied. Spanish stopped being a bridge to something else and became a kind of home once I learned how to let meaning live inside the words themselves. I stopped reaching for equivalents and began to feel the language from the inside. And it was in that quiet shift—when I began to think within Spanish rather than across it—that the city in my mind began to truly breathe.
For almost a year, I tried to bring this alternate universe into the physical world by attempting to move away from my own country and start a life in Spain. I wanted the slow mornings. I wanted the cafecito. I wanted to take siestas and feel the blaring heat on my skin—maybe even tan, something my Asian mother would absolutely lose her mind over. I wanted to walk on cobblestone streets and pensar—to think about the history, the loss, the power. To reflect on how I, in my own quiet way, might reclaim something for the Indigenous Filipinos who were wiped out, forgotten, overwritten. I gave this dream my full heart, believing that maybe this imagined world could finally become real. Something I could meet in person. Something I could stand inside.
And maybe, if I keep trying—if I keep building toward it—I can create something that lasts. Not just for me, but for someone else, too. Maybe I can leave behind a trail of breadcrumbs for another Filipino, dreaming up their own alternate universe. Maybe it won’t look like a city the way mine does. Maybe it’ll take another shape entirely. But the longing, the search, the quiet hope—maybe that part will feel familiar.
The documents were difficult to obtain—it felt like jumping through endless hoops just to get a single piece of paper. They were expensive, and I found myself caught between two bureaucracies—Filipino and Spanish—each as frustrating and tangled as the other. It was months of stress, tears, anxiety... and long nights of extra work just to fund the move. And the documents? They were only a morsel of the journey.
No one ever talks about this part—the ugly, exhausting side of chasing a dream. It felt almost hostile at times. Both governments were unkind, unwelcoming. Almost unwilling to help.
There are hundreds—maybe thousands—of people who’ve built cities in their minds, just to imagine a better life. I was just another one of them.
But in those long months of preparation, despite everything, I held on to the hope that one day—when all the documents were finally submitted and assessed—I would’ve done something real. I would’ve taken one true step toward bringing my city to life.
But even after all the paperwork was finally submitted, the wait dragged on. The embassy had my passport, and with it, it felt like they were also holding my breath. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. My days blurred into one another, my mind circling around the same anxious thoughts. I felt like my heart had turned into a pufferfish—swelling with tension, on the verge of bursting from the pressure.
And then, quietly, without ceremony, the answer arrived.
No one ever talks about the sadness that comes with a visa denial. Maybe because not everyone in the world ever has to experience it. It’s a unique kind of grief—a letter that only people from third world countries really understand. A cold, official document telling you why you can’t enter a country you’ve dreamed of living in. As if the invisible borders on a map had suddenly grown into real, solid walls—ones you can’t climb, can’t pass, can’t talk your way through.
And I just sat there, holding that piece of paper after the mailman handed it to me. Half relieved. Half devastated. Suspended in this strange, quiet moment where it felt like the world around me was melting.
Not everything works out the way it should. The visa was denied. A chapter in my novel of dreams was abruptly shut.
And the city? This philosophical metaphor for freedom—for understanding and accepting myself—it stays in my mind. For now.
It took me a few months to mourn the loss. I had built a city in my mind—my own cobblestone streets and stone walls. Something alive, something ancient. A place that needed no translation. Even after the visa denial, the city remained. I thought I would simply let it go. That I’d stop thinking in Spanish. That I’d move on, continue with my life, maybe take a break from all the dreaming, the building, the wondering.
But then I thought of all the people who had made this city possible. Within this imagined place, I had built real relationships—across countries, across time zones. I had come to understand and accept another culture. I met modern-day Spanish people who were kind, joyful, and in many ways, quietly apologetic for what their empire once did to mine and so many others. They showed me that the city doesn’t have to die just because I couldn’t physically be there.
They reminded me that the city can stay alive—not only in place, but in connection. It can remain in my mind, because across all the borders, something real had already taken root. Something that still breathes. So, with another visa—a more common one this time—I returned to Spain. Maybe to finally see it the way I had always imagined: slow, sunny, and free. I came back as a tourist, just another holidaymaker. And on that first day, as my feet touched the ground, it felt like something was being gently tied up—loose ends from a dream that never fully came true. Maybe now, I thought, I can finally begin to stop mourning the loss.
And I—a Filipino—imagined an alternate universe in that same country, one where I could finally be free. I dreamt with both eyes open, holding on to the vision as tightly as Spain once held on to my homeland for over 300 years.
In all its 300 years of suffering, and now, more than half a century into the modern world, I gathered hundreds of documents and marched into the embassy, hoping for a chance at something more. Something new. Something of my own.
And even though that chance was denied, something lingered. The dream didn’t vanish. It shifted. Because now, standing in the very country that once denied me, I see the strange paradox of it all—how the place that once conquered us could also be the space where I’ve begun to reclaim parts of myself. Not through conquest, but through language. Through connection. Through living memory.
I’m still walking through the version of Spain I once built in my mind. Slowly. Cautiously. As a visitor, yes—but one who knows exactly what she’s looking for. The door has been opened now, and the ancient language lives in my mind. It continues to reveal pieces of my history—slowly, gently—as I discover more words and learn how to string them together into meaning. Spanish is still foreign. Still borrowed. But I’m no longer mourning the fact that my body and the language cannot live in the same place at once.
Because I’ve come to understand that the dream doesn’t have to end. The chapter doesn’t have to close.
I’m keeping it open.
To exit now means something different. It means I get to keep moving.