A City Can Be A Mutual Friend

November 10th, 2025

A city can be a mutual friend. I'm not a New Yorker, far from it, but when I'm there with people who know it well, I feel like I know it too. London, on the other hand, is a soul mate; no matter how far I go or what I do, I know we will end up together. Barcelona must be a distant relative. Someone who carried me as a baby, whose arms shaped my world when I knew nothing else. A city so familiar and yet a place I don't know anyone, where all my ties have been frayed and disintegrated into impossibly loose ends.

I first met Barcelona at the same time I entered the world. The city grid encompasses my learning to speak, my first day at school, losing all my baby teeth, doctors' visits, shopping with my mum, crying in the car, where a teacher decided to call me 'Leti' for the first time, unknowingly renaming me for good.

The city's and my severance happened when I was 7, when I moved away. It didn't happen all at once but was cemented when my parents realized I had lost my fluency, lost at the dining table when surrounded by old friends. I suppose in every breakup there must be compromises. The city kept my Spanish; I took with me my conception of home and gave the title to another.

Whenever I return to Barcelona, I am perpetually retracing my steps - I long for a version of myself who belonged here. But since we left, each visit has created a layer obscuring the memories of my early childhood below. Rebecca Horn's structure on Barceloneta beach reminds me of renting scooters with my dad when I was 12, stumbling drunk as a teenager while the sun came up, on the back of a moped on my way to a restaurant when I was 18 or this summer, running on a Saturday morning, turning over in my head the idea of leaving America. Yet when I look for my Spanish accent or the sun that gave me my freckles - I only find a slightly younger me, looking for the same thing.