Before the Story Begins…

I didn’t go to Colombia intending to write a book about it.

I went because my husband couldn’t.

Adan and I had been married two short months when I boarded a plane to Bogotá alone to meet his family for the first time. We had met, fallen in love, and gotten married with the kind of speed that sounds completely unreasonable when reduced to a timeline: forty-six days from the day we met to the day we got married.

There are other places where I tell that part of our story.

This is about what happened next.

For reasons bigger and more complicated than a vacation schedule, Adan couldn’t return to Colombia with me. So I went without him - to meet his parents, his sister, his niece and nephew, his extended family. The people who had known and loved him long before I existed in his life.

I went partly for him.

I went partly for myself.

And I think, although I didn’t fully understand it at the time, I went for us.

Every night while I was there, Adan would call and ask me to tell him everything.

What did we do?

Where did we go?

What did everyone say?

What did I eat?

Who did I meet?

What did I think?

He wanted the complete rundown of the day, and I tried. But the days were enormous. By the time I crawled into bed at night, I was exhausted, overwhelmed, emotional, usually trying to process everything, and incapable of giving him anything close to the whole story.

Then I came home.

And he kept asking.

Tell me more about Colombia.

So I started writing things down.

At first it was nothing organized. A sentence here. A memory there. Something funny I didn’t want to forget. A moment with his mother. Something his father said. A meal. A photograph. A road. A river. The way it felt to walk into a room full of people I had technically never met and somehow already know them.

I thought I was writing it for Adan.

In many ways, I still am.

I wanted to give him the trip he hadn’t been able to take with me. I wanted him to know what it felt like to meet his family through my eyes, to stand in the places he had told me about, to watch the people he loved move through their ordinary lives, and to discover pieces of him everywhere I went.

But the more I wrote, the more the story kept opening.

What began as little pieces became pages. The pages became sections. The sections became days. And somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t simply documenting a trip anymore.

I was processing what it had changed.

Because Colombia changed something in me.

It changed the way I understood my husband. It changed the way I understood family and belonging. It changed the way I thought about home, culture, marriage, and what it means to love someone whose life began long before you entered it.

I had married Adan after forty-six days.

In Colombia, I began meeting all the versions of him who had existed before me.

The son.

The brother.

The uncle.

The child his mother remembered.

The young man his family still knew.

The person who had carried this country, these people, and these places inside him as he walked through seven countries to reach the United States - and eventually into our life in Arizona.

And somehow, while I was writing all of this down for him, another part of our life was beginning too.

We started talking seriously about building something together. A business. A future that combined pieces of his world and mine in ways neither of us had imagined when we met.

Suddenly, the website we were creating for that new chapter of our lives felt like the right place for this story too.

Initially, I thought I would hide it somewhere on the site, like a private little page and something mostly for us.

That idea lasted approximately five minutes because the story kept growing while at the same time, the people within it started asking if they, too, could read what I was writing.

So this blog, at least for now, is this story.

Each post is another piece of it.

A trip to Colombia.

A family I went there to meet without my husband.

A marriage that was still brand new.

A country I thought I was visiting and somehow began to feel connected to.

And a love story that turned out to have started long before the day Adan and I met, because loving someone eventually means learning the places and people that made them who they are.

I don’t know exactly what this will become when it is finished.

I only know why I’m writing it.

This is the story I came home and tried to tell my husband.

And somewhere along the way, it became my love letter to him.

Esta es mi carta de amor para ti, Adan. Te amo con todo mi corazón y con toda mi alma. Para siempre.

♥️