Did I accept Jesus as my personal savior?

A friend of mine likes to say that you haven't really been traveling until you get sick at least once. That's a nice mantra, but mine is a little different: I haven't been traveling until I get drunk, make a bad decision, and fall in love. Not necessarily in that order, and rarely are the all three occurrences connected (though the 1st and 2nd occurrences are quite obviously intertwined with frequency).

Jesús was another one of the fantastic people I met upon disembarking from the bus in La Ceiba, Honduras. Actually, I met him in a restaurant later that day, where he was eating with Daniel. Another Spaniard, but from Madrid, so no mullet. In addition to different hairstyles, our 2 Spaniards were also entirely different characters: while Daniel is the type who imprints himself on your memory from moment one, Jesús is more the type who sneaks up on you and leaves a deeper impression. Or at least he snuck up on me.

Unhappy with the life he woke up to every day in Madrid, he sold his business and left - almost - everything behind to travel Latin America, the US, and Japan for 6 months to clear his head. It was 3 months and many countries into this journey of discovery that I found myself laughing at his unapologetically politically incorrect jokes about China and sharing the sentiment that swimming at midnight in the ocean under a full moon isn't really as romantic as one would hope.

He was determined to dive as much as possible and spend as little money as possible doing it, and I aimlessly followed him off the boat and up the street to Paradise Divers, which became our home for the next 5 days.

Perhaps it was the scenery, the hot weather, the early mornings on the dive boat, the lazy afternoons in hammocks, the meandering down Utila's main street in search of food. Or maybe it was the kind eyes, the thoughtful gestures, the unfaltering patience with my slow Spanish, the quick humor, the fact that even when I couldn't understand every word of his Madrid lingo I could still understand him... It was all of this, and just enough je ne sais quoi added to make me bemused, but not surprised, that after one day in his company a Honduran woman in a restaurant assumed we were married.

It also made me wish it were true a little bit. But Jesús, emotionally unavailable and dead-set against the institution of marriage, could offer me no more than eternal friendship. An offer I couldn't refuse, even if for those 5 days, and many 5 days after, he was my 3rd occurrence.