For about the last 3 years I’ve made a concerted effort to find out more about my parents. I’ve asked more questions about who they are, what they were like, some of their experiences. I’ve gotten to find out some crazy stuff. Like, how my mom studied to be a lawyer all the way up until her last semester in college but then decided to drop out. She dropped her law degree after her brother, a state attorney in charge of prosecuting members of Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel, was assassinated. I knew about my uncle but I never knew my mother studied law for so long. I got to find out some stuff about my dad, too. I knew he competed in the Pan American games but I never knew some of the stories he had about teammates or opponents. Anyhow, I called them last night because I thought about this recurring memory that I have from early in my childhood. I wanted to clear up any questions I had about it so I called. The memory is that I’m in the backseat of this taxi with my brother. There is a man driving and a woman in the passenger seat. The woman is wearing a ski mask and my brother is crying. I told my mom the memory and I asked her if I had ever been kidnapped. I asked because I knew that we had come to the United States because some narco guys were upset that my dad and his brother-in-law refused to sell them some farmland that they wanted to grow drugs on. These narcos started to extort and threaten my dad. My dad was the vice president of the biggest iron manufacturer in Colombia. My mother grew up in Colombia’s upper class. She especially was privileged in a country that has incredibly high levels of socioeconomic disparity. My dad, on the other hand, was sort of like this illegitimate son to a rich man. He grew up in the working-class neighborhoods of Medellín. He worked his way all the way up. Anyways, what I’m saying is that they both had money and when these narco guys find out about that they just decide to bleed you slowly. My mom and dad wouldn’t live their life that way so we left. I knew all of this. Anyways, when I was asking my mother about the kidnap story she interrupted me saying that she knew what I was talking about. She said I was talking about this shoot-out that we once witnessed on the outskirts of Medellín. The shoot-out was between the Colombian military and the FARC. The FARC had kidnapped some lady on the highway up ahead of us so the gunfight ensued as we drove through. I told her that I remember that, and that the memory I was telling her was different. She just said no, that nothing like that had happened. She gave the phone to my dad so that I could ask him more about everything. I asked him about the memory as well and he also denied it. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt like this before about both of them, but it felt like they were lying. They were just being weird and taking these pauses. I don’t know, it felt odd. I then proceeded to ask my dad about how they were extorted. I wanted to know the finer details of the events that transpired. He said that the narcos started calling them in different places. By doing that they showed that they knew where my family was at all times. They stopped my dad on his way home and stole his suv. My dad said that they were super calm and relaxed about it. They said it was to show that they could take whatever they wanted from him. I didn’t know that at all. I asked him if there was anything else and he just said that they asked for a certain amount of money or else “they would take something of more value.” Thinking about the ambiguity of that statement now as an adult is frightening. Maybe I was misinterpreting their weird pauses as lying when in reality it’s just them having to recollect trauma. I asked my dad if he knew what had happened to these narco guys. He said that he did, actually. I excitedly asked him to please tell me. He said that they were brutally gunned down in the countryside. He said that some of them had been burned to death, too. He told me that we almost went back but decided the United States was still a better option. We reminisced a little about what life would’ve been like back in Colombia. We talked a little about crypto and then we wrapped up the call and I told him good night. I still don’t know what that memory with the taxi is about. I’ll probably never know and that’s fine. I’m not the first Colombian who has been forced to piece together past realities of horror. I’ll be fine.