September began with forty-three years behind me, a heart covered in an unreasonable number of plasters, and the reasonable suspicion that, after everything that had happened so far, the universe owed me at least a written explanation.
The universe, which rarely answers correspondence, sent me dizziness instead, along with perfumes, a workshop, a publication, several moons, a Kaiserschmarrn, and a university degree that insists on addressing me as Doña.
Not necessarily in that order.
I responded as any sensible person would when faced with chaos: I organised my perfumes and tarot decks into eight kingdoms.
The strategy proved questionably effective.
I turned forty-three taking inventory. Not only of the years, but of the improbable things that had somehow fitted inside them and, particularly, inside the last twelve months: I finished a Master’s degree, wrote, published, travelled, studied, lost kilos and centimetres, went to museums, finished projects, started others, graduated, became a student again, and began to suspect that perhaps I might also be a teacher.
I did not arrive in September intact.
But I arrived.
My birthday came with its own small inventory of absences. No family call arrived from Mexico. Only Fátima, a small and stubborn exception, crossed the distance to remind me that affection has a dreadful relationship with genealogy and a considerably better one with choice.
I had arrived in September with expectations. Some reasonable; others, in retrospect, probably made from materials of dubious provenance. I expected certain words, certain gestures, certain confirmations.
They did not come.
As usual, they did not come.
For a few days, that hurt with the administrative precision of something I had, deep down, already known.
Then something less spectacular and considerably more useful happened: something cracked inside me. I do not know whether it was a loss or a controlled demolition. Probably neither. Controlled demolitions do, as a rule, tend to be controlled.
But among the rubble, space appeared.
And that ended up being one of September’s extravagances: it did not necessarily give me what I expected.
It gave me other things.
People who did show up. A full room. Texts that found somewhere to go. Friends. Small journeys. Trees. Perfumes. A teenager with equations. A moon on the second attempt. Even a king — a real one, the King of Spain — calling me Doña from a piece of paper.
Seen that way, perhaps abundance is not always about receiving more.
And September carried on.
First came the wait for my first writing workshop. I prepared The House: Inhabiting Memory with the sort of meticulousness normally reserved for a military operation or deciding where to position a bottle of perfume. I read, wrote, made slides, printed papers, visited the venue, calculated timings, and contemplated every possible variety of catastrophe.
Then the 17th arrived.
People came.
They wrote.
They spoke.
They were moved.
Some people cried.
And I, against every forecast previously produced by my nervous system, did not die.
More bewildering still: I enjoyed myself enormously.
I came home that evening with that strange euphoria that appears when something that has existed only inside one’s head for a very long time somehow survives contact with the outside world.
Around the same time, I was told that one of my texts had been selected for an anthology due to appear in January. Apparently, while I was busy wondering what the hell I was doing with my life, my life was getting on with things without requesting authorisation.
There was also a Mexican party. I dressed in enough colours to provoke a chromatic emergency in certain parts of Europe, danced, ate, met up with friends, and confirmed once again that my relationship with aesthetic discretion remains strictly diplomatic.
In between all this, I kept training.
The equinox arrived.
Estrangement and extrañadera.
The trees began to change.
I went to the cinema.
I read.
I walked.
I looked.
And I got dizzy.
For several days. On trains. Walking. After doing squats. Sometimes, apparently, for no reason whatsoever. I need to go to the doctor. I know.
My body thus inaugurated its own philosophical movement, based on the premise that stability is a bourgeois construct.
My sense of smell, meanwhile, decided to join the uprising. Some days I could smell perfume; other days, absolutely nothing. In Saarbrücken, someone handed me an Ethiopian coffee to smell, and I gave a reasonably convincing performance of a person capable of smelling coffee.
It was around then that I decided to reorganise my cabinet de curiosités.
Eighty-something — hopefully — bottles of perfume, tarot decks, oracle cards, books, jewellery, elephants, Frida Kahlo, objects collected here and there, and an imprudent amount of symbolism were summoned before a taxonomic council.
Eight territories emerged. There was alchemy, light, opulence, vegetation, fire, memory, witchcraft, and oracles.
Everything found its place. I was still looking for mine, but one cannot solve everything in a single weekend.
Then I crossed a border for a shredded pancake.
Dismembered, the poor thing. Like my heart.
Technically, I went to see Saarbrücken. In practice, I had been thinking about eating Kaiserschmarrn for months and decided that travelling to another country was a perfectly reasonable way to resolve the matter.
The expedition included windmills against the sky, squares, flowers, beer, enormous stuffed potato dumplings, shops, perfumes I could not smell, autumn window displays, a museum, Andy Warhol and, finally, the Kaiserschmarrn.
It was worth it.
The day had actually begun the night before, with a full moon that my phone transformed into a glowing circle of questionable astronomical credibility. I looked up how to photograph it. When I returned to Luxembourg, I tried again.
This time, the moon appeared.
I like to think September worked a little like that: first, a luminous blur I did not know how to interpret and then, with a little luck and some adjustments to the exposure, something slightly clearer.
Although one should not become too solemn about these things.
The next day I was photographing crows.
In the middle of all this, Fátima asked me for help with some equations. We saw each other over video call. Seeing her face again was a bubble in time. For a while, there were notebooks, numbers, explanations, and her face on the other side of the screen.
It was a small thing and, for reasons that fit into no taxonomy whatsoever, enormous.
And just when September seemed prepared to withdraw without further extravagance, the facsimile of my official Master’s degree appeared.
There was my name: Doña Hilda Guadalupe Hurtado Encarnación.
It is difficult to sustain a bout of impostor syndrome when Felipe VI addresses you as Doña.
On the last day of the month, I also woke with a feeling that was strange and very simple: gratitude.
September, in the end, had been good to me.
Generous, even.
It had given me work that mattered, people, words, journeys, small recognitions, excellent food, the occasional answer, and a few new questions to prevent me from becoming unbearable.
It had been an abundant month, and for once I felt no urge to interrogate the abundance or search for a hidden clause.
Only to give thanks.
In the afternoon, the cemetery. Not just any cemetery.
One of those places that belongs simultaneously to geography and biography.
I went back to visit my dead… Although not all the dead are necessarily buried there.
And that was how September ended: with one workshop taught, another book on its way, a mysterious body, a reorganised cabinet, perfumes that sometimes exist and sometimes do not, a moon I had learnt how to photograph, equations explained across thousands of kilometres, an official document making its way to the Spanish Embassy in Luxembourg, and a visit to those who, somehow, remain part of the inventory.
I do not know whether any of this constitutes progress, metamorphosis, thaumaturgy, or merely an accumulation of vicissitudes.
But September was generous to me.
And before filing it away, I wanted to thank it.
I suppose some months end with a full stop.
This one ended with a bow.
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