The Blue House Speaks

I didn’t know she was watching me.

As I exited the Uber somewhere in Coyoacán, I caught a glimpse of the radio station — 100.9 FM. A small thing. But, for me, it was monumental. I snapped a photo for posterity. To be certain, for anybody else, the radio station is barely worth noticing. Except that October 9 (or 10/9) is my birthday, and the mind does what the mind does.

The Blue House swallowed me whole.

Three weeks later, I was back in Los Angeles.
My sister called. Had I visited Kahlo’s home? she wanted to know. We talked, and as we did, I found myself standing before a table — an ordinary table, in an ordinary room, thousands of miles from Coyoacán. On it: three postcards, each printed with Frida Kahlo’s face. Her eyes — those famously uncompromising eyes — seemed aimed directly at me, as if the Blue House had followed me home.

I mentioned it to my sister, the odd feeling of being studied by a dead woman’s image, multiplied three times over. We marveled at the coincidence and moved on.

Neither of us thought to check the date.
A few hours after we hung up, I was scrolling through Instagram when a photo stopped me. Frida Kahlo, staring up from my screen. Beneath it, a caption:

Happy Birthday, Frida!

That had been her birthday — the very day my sister called asking about the Blue House, the very day Frida’s eyes had found me again from across a table in Los Angeles, three weeks and two thousand miles from where it all began.
The radio, the postcards, the date. She had been announcing herself the whole time. I just hadn’t known to listen.