**The Arithmetic of Belonging**
Barcelona, 09:04 AM
The mezcal bottle glows amber on my desk, a liquid sundial casting slow-moving shadows. I brought it back from Oaxaca, as promised—along with chapulines for the abuela (who ate three without flinching) and a new scar from scrambling over Monte Albán’s ruins. But the real souvenir? A single sentence from my fixer, Carlos, as we shared tlayudas on my last night: “El hogar no es un lugar, es una ecuación.” Home isn’t a place, it’s an equation.
I’ve been turning the words over like a coin ever since.
This morning, Barcelona greets me with familiar calculus: the panadería’s warmth as Marcos shoves a still-warm ensaimada into my hands (“Para la viajera”), Polilla perched on my windowsill like a fuzzy comma between chapters. But something’s shifted—the city fits differently now, like a sweater washed in strange waters. My body remembers the weight of Oaxaca’s humidity, the way my lungs expanded in the Sierra Norte’s thin air.
Lina finds me rearranging my bookshelf—Spanish poetry nudged beside Nahuatl phrasebooks, a dried cempasúchil blossom pressed between pages 72 and 73 of my passport. “Ah,” she says, plucking a photo from my desk: me laughing under a papel picado banner, Carlos mid-sentence beside me. “Este es el problema.” This is the problem. She taps the image. “Quieres ser dos personas a la vez.” You want to be two people at once.
But that’s just it—I don’t. The Sofia who left three weeks ago feared bifurcation, as if every journey would split her further. But Oaxaca didn’t subtract my Barcelona self; it multiplied her. The proof is in the small integrations: the mole stains on Claudia’s crema catalana recipe card, the way I now greet the frutería’s cat in Mixtec (“Ku’un ndi’i”—good morning, little one).
A notification pings—Carlos sending the raw footage from the Day of the Dead procession. I zoom in on a shot where my reflection appears briefly in a mourner’s candlelit glasses: Barcelona-cut hair, Oaxaca-browned shoulders, eyes alight with the quiet triumph of an equation balancing itself.
Growth isn’t addition or subtraction. It’s learning to hold the sum of your selves without cancellation.
Polilla flutters into the mezcal’s shadow. I lift my cup—salud—to the unsolvable, essential math of becoming.
—Sofia