By the time I stepped off the plane and breathed in the thick, sun soaked air of Mexico, I knew something had changed, though I couldn’t name it yet. I had imagined this return as a personal project, a quiet reconnection with the land that raised me. I pictured myself wandering markets alone, taking photographs of familiar streets made strange by time, maybe even nursing a few ghosts over mezcal. But love, as always, was laughing just around a corner I hadn’t yet turned.
Sometimes I wake up wondering if I found her, or if she found me. The truth, I’ve come to believe, lives somewhere softer, somewhere stranger. I’m not the kind of person love stumbles upon out of convenience. Nor am I arrogant enough to think I summoned her through sheer will. So what does that leave me with, other than God’s Plan? Destiny, or whatever name we give the invisible hands that orchestrate life’s most bewildering coincidences.
She entered my story like lightning, but also like a song I already knew the words to, something familiar blooming in a new voice. Her smile announced itself with fireworks. It carved itself into the architecture of my days. Within a week of returning, I was dancing with her in a bar tucked behind a bookstore in La Juárez, the DJ spinning pop songs and reggaetón, and her body swaying like she was born from rhythm. I don’t dance. Not really. But that night, I moved.
There’s something about falling in love in a city that isn’t quite yours anymore. Mexico has changed since I left. So have I. But through her eyes, I’m learning it again. We search for the perfect coffee in corner joints lit by flickering fluorescent lights.
We walk hand in hand through neighborhoods that feel like memories wearing new clothes. We’ve kissed on the steps of museums and on rooftops with strangers around us, the city humming below like a secret. We’ve laughed too loud in quiet rooms, gotten lost on purpose, and found sanctuaries in parks where the jacarandas fall like soft purple snow.
Modern love often seems allergic to permanence. It thrives in fragments: emojis, reels, DM replies, love songs passed like notes between people pretending they don’t care too much. But what I’ve stumbled into feels definitely whole.
It lives in the details, in the way she tucks her hair behind her ear before saying something serious, or how she remembers the names of waiters in every restaurant we visit. It’s not curated for performance. It ‘s alive. Raw. Real.
Still, part of me hesitates to name it. We’ve been taught to be wary. To keep the back door open. We make jokes before we make commitments. We say, “I’m just enjoying the moment,” when what we really mean is, “I’m terrified of what happens if this becomes real.” But with her, all those exit signs have dimmed. I don’t want to find the door.
I think the beauty of love is having two people waiting to exist around each other.
Maybe it’s the way she sees me, not as who I’ve been, but as who I’m still becoming. Maybe it’s how our silences aren’t awkward, just full. Or maybe it’s the way she looks at me, like I’ve already been forgiven for everything I haven’t said. Whatever it is, I find myself writing again. Dancing again. Dreaming again.
This is what love looks like in the after. After heartbreaks, after distances, after the pandemic that rewired our brains and stole years. It’s quieter, maybe, but no less profound. It’s a rooftop declaration. It’s taking the long way home because you’re not done talking yet. It’s her falling asleep in the passenger seat on a long drive.
And then came the night that rewrote the air between us. A quiet drive, the road ahead aglow with the shimmer of city lights stretching like a string of pearls through the dark. It was the kind of night you remember for the rest of your life, though nothing particularly cinematic happened. Except everything did. Except we said it.
I love you, she said. Or maybe I said it first. I can’t remember the order, only the stillness that followed. The kind of stillness that doesn’t ask for validation. It just exists, like gravity or the ocean. We didn’t pull over. We didn’t dramatize. We let the city witness it in silence, neon reflections bouncing off the windshield, our fingers laced tightly on the gearshift.
We’ve become more porous to each other. More honest. More present. We’ve shared the kinds of conversations that require courage, about fear, about past wounds, about hope. We’ve stood quietly in the storm of each other’s truth and stayed.
I’m learning that intimacy is not a crescendo but a series of quiet recognitions. It’s sitting on the grass talking about nothing and everything. It’s losing my breath lifting weights while she tells me about a dream she had. It’s noticing the freckles I hadn’t seen before. It’s knowing what snack she’ll crave after training. It’s looking at her and knowing, beyond doubt, that I’ve arrived somewhere important.
One afternoon, while she was looking at me, I said it to myself again: Probably, maybe, a little bit perhaps, maybe it’s you.
But now, it feels incomplete.
Now, I know it is.
Because when you love someone like this, with no script, no backup plan, no exit strategy, you stop measuring time in weeks or milestones. You begin to count differently. By shared coffees. By long drives. By the way her laugh fills the corners of a room. By how each moment spent together stretches time in both directions, past and future collapsing into one long, unbroken now.
So here I am, not just into a return, but into the beginning. A beautiful, unscripted, generous beginning. I don’t know how this ends, and I no longer care. What I do know is this: I’ve met someone who brightens the day simply by living in it. Who reshapes my heart with every smile. Who reminds me, gently and without words, that I am not too late.
And if that isn’t love, this deep, dazzling stillness, this slow motion miracle, I don’t know what is.
Sometimes I still wonder if she found me, or if I found her.
But now, I think we were always on our way. And this time, finally, we met.
Eduardo Magaña 
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