I got kicked out of class again. This time because I told Mr. Garza that his explanation of feudalism was technically correct but conveniently left out the part where the Church took twenty percent of everything. I didn't say it rudely, just as a fact. Mr. Garza said it was disrespectful. I argued that debating is different from being disrespectful. He sent me to the principal's office. In the office, I sat in the hallway chair and started writing this. Miss Ramirez, the secretary, asked if I was okay. I told her I was fine, that the problem was I was right, and that bothers people more than being wrong. She laughed. At least someone in this building has a sense of humor. So far, I've been sent here three times this month. The record is still last year with seven.
No one in my family understands how my mind works. My dad says I have too much energy. My mom says I don't focus. My older brother calls me a clown. None of them are entirely wrong, but they're not right either. It's not that I don't focus; it's that I focus on things they don't find important and disconnect from the things they do. It's not that I'm a clown; it's just that when a situation is ridiculous, pointing it out seems more honest than pretending it's not. The problem isn't how I function. The problem is that my way of functioning doesn't fit the system. And the system is never going to change, so I'll have to find a way to live on the edges without getting lost inside.
I saw a video of a guy on YouTube talking about therianthropy. At first, I thought it was one of those weird internet videos that turn out to be a joke. But it wasn't. The guy explained things with a precision that unsettled me: the discomfort with rigid hierarchies, the instinct to quickly adapt to any situation, the tendency to find the exits of systems before the main doors. And he said his inner species was a coyote. I paused the video. Rewound it. Watched that part three times. Then I closed the laptop and went for a walk in the hills for half an hour because I needed to process what I had just heard with my body. The coyote. Of course.
I searched for everything I could find about real coyotes. Canis latrans. The only canine that expanded its territory in the twentieth century despite systematic hunting and urbanization. They're in cities now, in parks, on the edges of highways, in all the places where no one expected them. Biologists say the coyote learned to live on the margins of the human world with an efficiency that no other large predator achieved. It's omnivorous, opportunistic, territorial but flexible. It adapts to the available menu. It learns human patterns faster than humans learn theirs. It didn't survive despite everything. It survived because everything is useful to it. That resonated with me in a way I can't explain without sounding dramatic, so I won't try.
I found the Discord group, The Pack. I joined with the nickname Coyotl, which is the Nahuatl name. There were people from Spain, Argentina, Chile, Colombia. Also from Mexico, though fewer. I introduced myself like this: 'Hi, I'm from Monterrey, coyote, just starting to understand this.' A girl from Buenos Aires named Luna replied in twenty seconds: 'Welcome, Coyotl. I'm a fox, so we're evolutionary neighbors.' It made me laugh. That's exactly the kind of thing I would say. I spent three hours on the server that first day. The conversation flowed like it hadn't with people in a long time. I didn't have to explain why I function this way. They already know it from the inside.
I asked my grandmother Consuelo if she knew anything about Huehuecoyotl. She stayed silent for a moment and asked why I wanted to know. I told her I was reading about Nahuatl mythology. It wasn't a lie, just the short version. My grandmother is from Nuevo León but her family was from Hidalgo, and she knows things that don't appear in official history books. She said, 'The old coyote. The one who laughs at everything. The one who liked to cause chaos to see what happened next.' I asked if he was bad. She said, 'He wasn't bad or good. He was necessary. Without chaos, there's no change, and without change, everything rots.' I thought about that all day. Necessary. Not bad. Not strange. Necessary.
I read more about Huehuecoyotl in INAH books I found in PDF. He was the god of music, dance, song, and trickery. Not cruel trickery but creative trickery, the kind that disrupts to reorder better. In the Codex Borbonicus, he appears dancing, always in motion. The Nahuas saw him as a force you couldn't control or ignore: if you tried to suppress it, the false order would collapse anyway. If you accepted it, you found a freedom that rigid order would never give you. I'm not saying I'm a god. I'm saying that carrying some of that energy isn't a factory defect. It's a heritage of centuries that someone named before me and found a place for in the cosmos.
My friend Marco asked why I was suddenly so into 'that animal stuff.' Not in those words, but that was the tone. I explained what I could: that it was an identity, not a role-playing game, that it wasn't that I thought I was physically a coyote but that there was something in that animal that described how I process the world. Marco listened attentively, which is a lot for him. In the end, he said, 'It makes sense for you.' That's the same thing Luna's friend in Buenos Aires said. It's curious how sometimes people who care about you may not fully understand something about you and yet recognize that it's legitimately yours. Marco invited me to the court afterward. I went. I played badly as always but with more enthusiasm.
Chipinque. The Chipinque Ecological Park is in the Sierra Madre Oriental, twenty minutes from the city. There are oaks, pines, deer, northern foxes, and coyotes. I know because I went a thousand times as a child with the family but never with these eyes. I suggested to my dad that we go on Saturday. He was surprised because usually, I'm the one looking for reasons not to go to family activities. I told him I wanted to do real hiking, not the paved path. He looked at me strangely. Then he said yes. Dad doesn't understand many things about me but he does understand hiking. That's enough for me for now.
On the server, I talked with Sombra, who is a wolf and lives in Madrid. She asked if there were places in Monterrey to connect with nearby nature. I described Chipinque: the mountain range visible from the city, the drop in temperature when you enter the park, the smell of pine that reaches you before you see the trees. She said, 'That's what you need.' She's right, but I already knew that. Sometimes I need someone from outside to confirm it for me to take it seriously. Known problem. The pack is good for that: people who see you from an angle you can't see alone.
Saturday. Chipinque. We took the first long trail, the four-hour one. My dad keeps a steady pace. I go back and forth, explore side paths, weave in and out of the trees, ask what each plant is. My dad says I'm like a dog with six leashes. He doesn't know how close he is. The light between the oaks is different from any other light: greener, more alive, with that heavy smell of damp earth. I've been here two hours and already feel like last week was a month ago. The city's noise exists but is far below, like it belongs to another dimension. Up here, the only noise that matters is the birds and the branches.
Halfway down the trail, my dad sat down to rest and I went ahead a few meters. There was a spot where the trail split and one of the branches led down to a stream. I peeked. The water was low but flowing. There were tracks in the mud. I photographed them. I looked them up on an app: Canis latrans. Coyote. I didn't see the animal, just the tracks. But they were fresh, probably from that morning. I crouched down and placed my hand next to one of the tracks to compare them. The track was smaller than my hand but more perfect: each pad marked with precision, the claws clear. Someone had passed through here before me. And we both knew how to use this terrain.
We returned to the car as it was getting dark. The park closes but there's a night observation area in season. I convinced my dad to stay half an hour longer. I didn't tell him why. We sat on a bench near the lookout. The city of Monterrey looked below like an electric circuit, millions of lights at the bottom of the valley. The Cerro de la Silla silhouetted against the orange sky turning purple. My dad was silently watching the city. I was looking at the forest behind us. Waiting. Not knowing exactly for what.
It was at seven forty-three in the evening, I know because I wrote it down immediately afterward. From somewhere in the forest, maybe three hundred meters away, maybe less, I heard a howl. Not the bark they sometimes give when they're nervous. A real howl, long, with that characteristic modulation that rises and falls and ends in something that sounds like a question. My dad was startled. I stayed completely still. The howl lasted about four or five seconds. Then silence. Then another, shorter, different individual. My dad said softly, 'Coyotes.' I said, 'Yes.' Nothing more. But inside, something activated that I can't describe precisely: a recognition that didn't go through the brain. It was deeper than that.
My dad suggested we leave. I said, 'Give me a minute.' He waited. I walked a few meters toward the edge of the forest, where the lookout's light no longer reached. I stood in the darkness of the edge. I breathed. I thought of Huehuecoyotl dancing in the codex, always in motion. I thought of the tracks in the mud. I thought of the months of understanding what this internal noise I always had was and that no one could name for me. And I howled. Not loudly, almost in a whisper. A small, private howl, probably inaudible to any human ear more than ten meters away. But real. The first sound I made that came from that place and no other.
My dad didn't hear anything. We returned to the car. On the way, he asked if the trip had been worth it. I said yes. He asked why I was so interested in coyotes all of a sudden. I told him I had been reading about them and found them incredibly adaptable animals. He said yes, that in the hills of Monterrey there had always been coyotes, that when he was a child, the older people told him they saw them often. That now with urban expansion there are fewer but they're still there. That they had adapted. I said, 'Exactly.' He thought we were talking about biology. We were also talking about biology.
Back home, I wrote for an hour. I tried to put in order what happened in Chipinque. The howl I heard didn't change my shape, didn't reveal any cosmic mystery, wasn't a mystical experience. It was something simpler and harder to explain: it was confirmation. Like when you look up a word in the dictionary and find it and realize you already knew what it meant, you just needed to see it written. The coyote existed in that forest. I was there. We both operated on the margins of the same world. And I howled back even if no one heard it. That was enough.
I told The Pack the next day. Luna wrote: 'Coyotl, that's exactly what you needed.' Sombra sent a gif of a coyote walking and said: 'You're one of us now.' About ten people responded in five minutes. Not with drama, but with that normalcy that I value most about the group: my experience was received as it was, without exaggeration or minimization. Someone from Colombia asked how the northern coyote's howl sounded compared to the one in their region. We spent half an hour comparing sound recordings of different coyote subspecies. It's exactly the kind of conversation I'd never have at school.
I asked my grandmother Consuelo what she thought of therians. I explained the concept without going into whether I was one or not. She listened, took a sip of coffee, and said: 'There wasn't a word for it before. But the thing existed.' She told me about a distant cousin in her family who, since he was a child, would go into the woods with the coyotes and come back two days later as if nothing happened. That no one in the village considered him crazy. They just knew he was like that, that he had something of the coyote inside, and they respected it. 'The problem is now,' she said, 'that people have lost the vocabulary for those things, and so what has no name scares them.' I wrote that down word for word. My grandmother Consuelo is right with unsettling frequency.
Last entry in this notebook. I'm still the one who asks uncomfortable questions in class. I'm still late when I don't care about what's at the end of the path. I'm still looking for the edges of systems before the main entrances. But now I know why. And I know that why has deep roots: in the animal that runs on the margins of all the cities on the continent, in the old god who danced in the codices before the word 'strange' existed, in all the people of The Pack who operate on that same frequency from Buenos Aires, from Madrid, from Bogotá. The coyote doesn't ask permission to exist in your city. It just is there, and it adapts, and it survives, and sometimes at night it howls just because it can. I can too. I did it once. It won't be the last.
