I didn’t know it at the time, but I met my first real love when I was fifteen. He was tall and confident, that was my first impression of him. We wouldn’t get together until four years later after he drunkenly confessed his undying love for me over BBM (Blackberry Messenger for those under thirty). I told him to drink a glass of water and go to sleep. The next morning, I woke up to a text from him saying he stood by everything he had said the night before. He flew to my city a month after that and the rest is history.

We had a two-year, long-distance relationship. I was in college in Bogotá and he was still living in Cali, our hometown. It’s hard for me to write about Colombia, my first home, the place where the sun touched my skin for the first time. Sometimes I feel I haven’t found the right voice to talk about it, but it’s a love I’ll never be able to get over.

Confident Guy introduced me to his mom as his future wife. We thought about that stuff early on, like the excited post-teenagers that we were, and saved all our pesos to see each other once a month, counting down the days for the semester to end so we’d have more time together. He had gone on a family trip to France at the very beginning of our relationship and put up a lock for us on the Seine. It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for me.

I had spent much of my life away from Colombia. My family moved away in the nineties when I was just a kid, during a time when anyone who could leave, did. Memories of my early years in Cali were tangled with fear and stories of cartel and political violence. I remember being in the car with my mom, my childhood friend Joel, and his mom. We took roller-skating classes together. Joel and I were playing with toy dinosaurs in the back seat when two motorcycles stopped the car and tried to snatch our moms’ jewelry. Joel and I instinctively curled up on the floor, shielding each other. We still made it to class. Another time, our Jewish day school was threatened by guerrilla groups and the military came to escort us home.

There was also my abuelita’s ranch, my horse, the neighborhood guachiman (watchman in a Colombian accent) who would smile at me and my younger brother, arepas, café de niños, and my Shakira cassette. But none of these things were safe. They were mixed in with the car bombings, kidnappings, and the occasionally detained school bus full of children.

We moved back when I was fourteen, a full year before Confident Guy came into my life. He was older and in his first semester of college for advertising. I was growing out of my emo phase and didn’t think myself as attractive as the more feminine, full Caleñas around me. By the time we got together, I had become immersed in my own culture again. I kept my hair long and learned to dance. Still, there was part of me that........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)