“I had just turned eighteen when we met. He was in his thirties. I’d wanted to go to the beach that day, but my mother made me go to a restaurant with her friends. While we were eating, this gringo came over and started talking to us. He didn’t speak a word of Portuguese, and I didn’t speak a word of English. My mother’s friends were encouraging him to talk to me. One of them gave him my number, and the next day he started texting me these simple Spanish phrases. He’d write things like: ‘Vamos a la playa,’ which was funny, because I spoke Portuguese. Eventually he asked to take my mother and I out to dinner. He kept a dictionary in his hand the entire time we were eating, and he spoke in very short phrases. I asked him what he did, and he accidentally said ‘diving.’ So for a long time, I thought I was dating a diver. When he went back to America, he started sending me cards. Then he began to visit on the weekends. It was all very exciting for me. I fell in love with him. But I didn’t really know him. Whenever we were together, he was away from the worries of his life. I fell in love with someone who was on vacation.”
