A Love Story by Time, Patience, and Poetry

She was just thirteen when he first asked.

“Will you marry me?”

The question came not from a man but a boy with ink-stained fingers and eyes too full of stars to see the ground. It happened under paper lanterns at a modest town hall dance in the small Colombian town of Baranoa.

The scent of hibiscus was heavy in the air, and the old phonograph played a crackling bolero.

Lucia Valdez had come to the dance with her cousins, dressed in a hand-me-down dress that fluttered when she twirled. Santiago Alvarez, barely fifteen, had been scribbling in a corner, his notebook resting on his knees.

She caught his eye—quiet, composed, and glowing in the soft light.

Santiago walked up, heart pounding like a runaway horse, and said:

“I’ve just realized—all my poems are about you. Will you marry me?”

Lucia tilted her head, amused, and replied with the grace of someone who somehow knew this boy would change the world.

“Alright,” she said, “but let me finish school first.”

They didn’t exchange rings or promises—just a glance that meant more than a thousand ceremonies.

Years passed like pages of a novel—some crisp with joy, others torn by hardship.

Santiago left Baranoa to chase his dream of becoming a writer in Bogotá. He wrote for a struggling newspaper, slept in friends’ rooms, and often skipped meals to buy ink.

His early work was ignored, dismissed as “too strange,” “too lyrical,” or “too hopeful.”

Lucia, meanwhile, finished school and became a schoolteacher. In quiet moments between lessons and lesson plans, she would write letters to Santiago, always ending with:
“Write your heart. I’m reading.”

Santiago never forgot those words. But life tested them both.

In Bogotá, Santiago fell into darkness. One night, after being rejected by his twelfth publisher, he packed his bag, sold his typewriter, and decided to return home. But as he walked past a post office, he received a letter from Lucia.

“If you’re losing hope, let me hold it for a while. I’ll keep it safe till you’re ready to take it back.”

It stopped him cold.

He rented a room, bought a second-hand notebook with his last coins, and began to write the story that had been fermenting inside him for years.

A story of a forgotten town where time moved in circles. A story full of ghosts, memories, forbidden loves, and the smell of ripe mangoes. A story about longing.

He called it “The Garden of Forgotten Words.”

For seven months, he wrote obsessively—eating less, speaking little, dreaming only in metaphors. Lucia sent him parcels—coffee, dried fruit, and once, a sweater with a note stitched inside:
“Finish it. Even if no one believes, I do.”

When the manuscript was finished, Santiago had no money to send it to the publisher he believed would understand it. Defeated, he wrote to Lucia.

Two days later, she sold her gold earrings—family heirlooms passed down from her grandmother—and mailed the manuscript herself.

What Santiago didn’t know was that Lucia, too, was being courted by another man—Julian, a local doctor. He was kind, stable, and adored her. Lucia’s family pressured her to settle, to move on from the dreamer who sent ink and promises from faraway cities.

But Lucia’s answer never changed: “My heart already knows its home.”

Months passed. Then came the call.

The publisher was stunned. He said the novel was “a masterpiece dipped in magic.” He offered Santiago a contract. When The Garden of Forgotten Words was published, it took Latin America by storm. Readers cried, laughed, and dreamt in its pages. Literary critics compared it to Márquez and Borges.

Overnight, Santiago became a literary phenomenon.

He was invited to give lectures, sign books, travel to Spain, and meet editors in New York. Fame, fortune, and applause—all things he had once begged for—now knocked at his door.

But something was missing.

At the peak of his success, Santiago returned home unannounced. He arrived at Lucia’s school during recess, dusty and wide-eyed. She looked up from her desk, and for a moment, they just stood there—two chapters reuniting.

He walked up, knelt on one knee in front of her entire class, and said:

“Will you marry me—now?”

The children gasped, the teachers clapped, and Lucia—smiling with tears dancing in her eyes—simply said:

“We were married the moment you wrote your first word for me.”

They wed a month later in a modest church, surrounded by townsfolk and the sweet sound of violin music. Santiago placed a ring on her finger and whispered:

“For every word I ever wrote, you were the ink.”

Years later, when Santiago won the prestigious Orquídea Prize for Literature, he held the trophy high but said only one sentence:

“This belongs to the woman who saw the garden in my desert.”

Behind every man the world remembers,
there is a woman the world forgets—
but he never does.

BE HAPPY… BE ACTIVE… BE FOCUSED… BE ALIVE

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