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Happy new year! It’s 2023! For the first week of the year I wanted to write about how special 2022 was. I mean, it was the year we achieved our life long dream of quitting our jobs to travel full time! I have so much to say about it and truly it has been such a joy-filled, soul-lifting, mind-enriching year. But then I started writing it around our anniversary, and one thing led to the next, and somehow I ended up with the below: a bit about our love story.

Dec 26 2022 marked nine years since Alan and I signed a piece of paper tying us together in a small nail salon in the north of Kauai. We signed our intense desire for “us” to work, woven with the fear that it might not be meant to be. You see, our love story was a complicated one, filled with heartbreak and sadness - of ourselves and others.

We decided to get married just 2 weeks before we were standing barefoot on the cool Hawaiian sand. None of our friends thought Alan and I were “together together”. And sure, we weren’t actually officially together, except we had been for years, just in our own complicated way. We told only a handful of people that we were planning to get married, and everyone was confused, including ourselves.

We said vows to each other on a wild beach, just like our dreams were. I don’t remember what I said, but what I felt is a clear as the ocean was that day: I love you I love you I love you, and also, what the fuck are we doing.

I never dreamed of having a weeding. Why do I need to be legally bound to someone?, I thought. I can love and be with someone without a piece of paper allowing me to do so. Fuck the system! And then I moved to the states, and if you know anything about the immigration system in this country is that it will slap you out of any ideological ideas and leave you with nothing but an intense desire to be truly free, to become an American citizen.

So, long before we bought our wedding clothing online, we had agreed to get married if Alan got his green card first. Not a real wedding, of course, we would just sign at the Seattle townhall.

And then Alan got his immigration notice. It was December then, and we were about to go on a trip with my parents to Hawaii, one we had dreamed of doing for years. Not long beforehand, we had decided to give our relationship a real shot - something it had never had. So I thought, we might as well do it right.

So while he drove us back from work one day I asked him: how about we get married in Hawaii?

And so we did.

It took me a long time to publish the gorgeous pictures of our wedding. Everything was so sudden, so rushed, so fresh from so much intensity and pain. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I didn’t want to hurt us. Everything felt so fragile.

But here we are, 9 years later.

Cuanta gratitud.

Gracias vida.

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