Who was this man I fell so deeply in love with?

Even now, years later, he lives in my memories and my heart.

José was filled with tenderness and honesty, carrying the weight of an unfortunate past. He was ‘somewhat’ emotionally guarded, yet that did not stop me from truly understanding him. He was intelligent, hardworking, disciplined - a man who  trained his body with the same determination he had once used simply to survive.

He kept himself muscular, strong, fit, but I did not fall for him because of his looks. I fell for the quiet confidence that sat behind his eyes, for the way he could be kind, sweet, gentle, and loving in moments when the world expected hardness.

He was born in Tapalpa, a charming "Pueblo Mágico" (Magical Town)  in Mexico, renowned for its rustic, colonial charm, featuring white buildings, red-tiled roofs, and cobblestone streets. His parents were respectable, loving people who taught their children right from wrong. His siblings followed the expected paths — trades, degrees, steady lives. He did not. At fourteen he left home for Tijuana, where the world he entered was all about survival.  Recruited and trained by the cartel, he learned to move people and contraband across borders, to read danger before it arrived. Later he crossed into the United States and found a place in the East Side Longos, a Sureño gang in Long Beach. Years of choices and consequences followed, and then decades behind bars. In prison he endured a brutal education of its own, and eventually rose to become a member of the Mexican Mafia, La Eme.

Those years carved him into the man I came to love.

Even when I learned the facts—cartel, gang, La Eme, twenty years in prison—were part of the story but never the whole of him. They layered him. They explained the armour and the scars, the ways he could be both gentle and tough at the same time. They explained why he carried silence like a second skin.

We met 2017, in a small seaside town on Mexico’s Pacific coast, Lo de Marcos.  For a long time we were simply friends—two people who found refuge in each other’s company while our lives were fraying elsewhere. I was in a bad marriage; he was struggling in his own relationship. Friendship became the slow, steady work of learning. We traded stories at first, small confessions that felt safe because they were not yet promises. He was honest in a way that disarmed me: blunt about his past, careful about his present. There was no theatrical confession, no dramatic reveal. He simply told me who he was, and I believed him. He didn’t have money, or a flashy life. He lived life with simplicity. I learned quickly that life in Mexico as a Mexican is tough, and because he had been in prison, life was tougher still. But for me, it was irrelevant, it was not something I even though about. He had a moral code, and he never abandoned me even when times were hard. That alone set him apart.

It all started when I gave him a small, deliberate nod. It was both permission and promise. He moved with a careful certainty. His hands were steady, touching my skin slowly yet surely, as if recording small, private things I had forgotten to notice about myself. Each touch was new sensation, each pause felt like an eternity of longing. Time folded — long, slow moments that stretched like the tide, and quick, bright sparks that were electric. I felt heat gather behind my sternum and then spill outward, not a single flare but a tide that rose and rose until it carried me. My voice came out in fragments, in soft exhalations that felt like a confession. He answered every small sound with attention, with a tenderness that made surrender feel like strength. He made me feel like a woman in the fullest sense — not because of anything physical, though the physical connection between us was undeniable, but because he saw me. His eyes held me with patience and curiosity, as if he were reading a page he was longing to understand. Being with him felt like stepping into a version of myself I had forgotten I could be: strong, soft, wanted, alive. Our intimacy deepened slowly, then all at once.

What happened between us wasn’t about mechanics; it was about recognition. It was the feeling of being seen without flinching, held without apology. Afterwards we lay tangled in the quiet. His hand folded over mine. In the morning light I watched him sleep and understood that what had happened was not only about desire. It was also about love.He left that morning for work, and I continued the day with the memory of being held and the knowledge that, for the first time in a long while, I had been allowed to be wholly, unapologetically myself. There was a strange clarity to it, as if the world had been simplified down to essentials: the press of his palm at the small of my back, the softness of his lips  when he kissed me, the quietness that fell when we stopped speaking. I felt seen in a way that rearranged the way I viewed my own future. When it reached its peak, it was not a single moment of noise but a layering of sensations — breath, warmth, the quickening of pulse — until everything blurred into a single, luminous moment of relief. It was the most alive I have ever felt.

I didn’t fall for him in a single moment. It happened the way dusk slips into evening — quietly, almost shyly, until suddenly the whole sky has changed and you can’t remember the exact moment it happened. What I remember most is the warmth. His warmth. The way he carried it in his voice, in his hands, in the steady presence that made me feel whole. The warmth that makes me believe, that, one day, we may find each other again. An good looking man who could have led with his looks but never did. He led with kindness, tenderness, trust - a true gentleman. He had this way of looking at me that made everything else fade. Not dramatic, not intense — just present. As if he wasn’t waiting for his turn to speak or calculating what he wanted from me. He was simply there, listening, absorbing, understanding.

I had grown used to being half‑heard, half‑seen, half‑held. With him, I felt whole.

The first time he touched my hand, it wasn’t even romantic. We were talking about something ordinary — I don’t remember what — and he reached out to emphasise a point, his fingers brushing mine. It was such a small gesture, but it landed with the weight of recognition. Something in me softened immediately. He was intelligent in a way that didn’t need to be performed. He didn’t show off. He didn’t correct. He didn’t dominate conversations. He asked questions that made me think, and he listened to the answers as if they mattered. That alone felt like intimacy.

But the real intimacy came later, in the quiet moments. The way he would tilt his head when he was trying to understand something I said. The way he laughed — not loudly, but with with a genuine smile. The way he held me, gently at first, then with a confidence that grew as he learned the shape of my trust. The intimacy between us deepened slowly, and intensified over time.  The sex was incredible, because we found trust. Every moment felt like a choice we were making together. When we finally crossed that threshold, it was an unbelievable connection. Afterward, he held me with a tenderness that surprised me. It was real. I remember thinking, This is what it feels like to be safe in someone’s arms.

Looking back now, I realise that what drew me to him, it was his tenderness and his honesty. A sense that he saw the parts of me I had learned to hide — the strength, the vulnerability, the longing — and didn’t flinch. He welcomed them. He welcomed me.

Everything changed suddenly. One day he left, he said he had to go to Guadalajara to visit his sister. I spoke to him on the phone a couple times in the first two weeks he was away. Then not long after, I found out he was in prison. It all happened so suddenly. To this day I still miss him, and I live with the ache of a love that we have no chance of a life together now. I have learned rituals that keep him near - I listen to Marvin Gaye on repeat “Let’s Get It On”and wear a tattoo of a beautiful note he once wrote. Most recently, I got the number 13 as a tattoo, to remember him by. And just by writing this chapter, it has reminded me of the incredible love we once had.

Loving him taught me that love does exist — not the kind that performs, but the kind that listens. The kind that stays. The kind that sees you.

The pain has softened, not because the love fades but because I learn to carry it differently.

In the quiet hours, I still hear him listening.

And that listening remains the truest thing I ever knew.