Nostalgia

There are places that stay with us everywhere we go; places that are as intimate as a lover’s embrace. They speak to us like a dream, in a language only our hearts can understand. These are the places we go back to over and over again when we want to shed the skin of our current cities. These are the places we long to be enveloped in; when we want to be vulnerable, when we want to rise from our ashes.

Some dawns I wake up, go outside, and just stare at the fading moon. I wonder how it would look like if I were in the Visayas or in Mindanao. Will the moon show me some facet of itself that it will only show in a specific place? I also wonder if at that very moment somebody else was thinking the same thoughts. Surely, I am not the only person to be captivated by a vanishing yellow moon.

Sometimes I try to re-capture the exact feeling I had when I was walking down my favorite street in each of the places I’ve spent a portion of my life in. I try to compare the degree of joy every place brings– how completely each of these places allows me to get lost in its streets and avenues, how these places give me the freedom to surround myself in my own thoughts.

All these reveries only brings me back to that one place– to Cebu. It’s as if my soul is willing me to go back there; begging, screaming that it will never be truly at peace until it wakes up every morning and breathe the City's air.  One famous Visayan writer (I forgot his name) once said, "Manila may be the place that I will marry, but Cebu is the place that I will always love."  This is so true in my case, but who knows, I may end up divorcing Manila soon and be with the love of my life.