What’s the first thing you think of when you think of Colombia? Be honest. Not the Amazon breathing its damp green lungs into the sky, not the Caribbean coast idling in turquoise, not the art or the music or the people who insist on warmth as a moral duty. No. You thought of Pablo Escobar. Or worse, you thought of Narcos, which is Escobar with better lighting and the moral authority of Netflix.

This is the lazy miracle of modern prejudice: we no longer need history, only a trailer. A whole country compressed into a binge-watch, subtitled, dramatised, conveniently violent. Colombia becomes not a place but a genre.

I wish I could say I arrived immune to this. I didn’t. I had watched Narcos, as research, and landed with my imagination primed for machine guns, whispered bribes and dramatic slow-motion deaths. Instead, reality was uncooperative. I was offered cocaine on the street exactly five times (hardly the torrent promised), not once was I shot, and no one asked me to wear a wire to a presidential party. The closest I came to organised crime was TikTok aggressively suggesting I join a coca farm, which felt less cartel and more algorithm.

What I didn’t yet realise was that disappointment, too, can be a form of entitlement.

This is the problem with preconceived ideas: they don’t survive contact with reality, but they do survive very comfortably inside your head. Because, even as nothing happened, my mind insisted something should. Every firecracker detonating joyfully in the street became a gunshot in my imagination. I waited, subconsciously, for the country to perform itself properly. For danger. For drama. For a plot.

That, perhaps, is the quiet indictment – not of Colombia, but of the traveller who arrives armed with narratives and leaves disappointed when they aren’t fulfilled. We don’t just carry stereotypes with us; we rehearse them, polish them, hope they’ll come onstage. And when they don’t, we accuse the place of being tame, when really, it’s our thinking that’s small.

So no, I was not invited to a cocaine lab, I did not become a gangster’s mistress, and my nose remains structurally sound. Nothing happened. Which, inconveniently, is the truth.

Because I know that’s not what you came for. You didn’t come for nuance or quiet evenings or a country refusing to misbehave. You came for spectacle. For the lurid, the illicit, the neatly packaged confirmation of everything you already believed.

If the country refused to give me a story, I could always supply one myself.

So fine, I will oblige, but first which should I take? The red pill or the blue?

Red. Of course you’d say red.

The night is too loud, neon sweating down the walls, everything vibrating as if the city has been plugged directly into my bloodstream. I’m moving impossibly fast through a mansion, marble floors slick with rum and conspiracy. Men with identical moustaches appear and disappear like thoughts I don’t finish. Everyone is talking at once. Everyone knows my name.

My brain is a newsroom on deadline. Ideas arrive fully formed and immediately obsolete. I am brilliant. I am doomed. I am absolutely certain about things I cannot remember.

Outside, helicopters thrum the sky like impatient gods. A rival gang are getting executed in the next room. A woman in red laughs and says I should leave the country immediately, handing me a briefcase of cash. A man in linen insists I stay forever, and says he’ll take care of the briefcase.

The walls breathe. Paintings glare. Somewhere a jaguar lounges by the staircase, bored, chewing on a Rolex. Salsa music collapses into sirens and reforms again. My heart is auditioning for escape velocity. I am convinced, utterly, that this moment explains everything.

Then, just as abruptly, this reality loses interest in me. The mansion dissolves. The men vanish. The jaguar clocks off. I wake up in a stale smelling room with a dry mouth, shaking hands, and the uncomfortable unknowing of what actually happened.

That reality is what happens when you take the red pill: the version where everything sharpens, accelerates, means something. Where danger feels aesthetic and proximity feels like understanding. It’s seductive because it offers access – you were almost there, almost inside the story. Did you enjoy believing in it? Would you enjoy living it?

What if you took the blue pill instead?

The one where nothing escalates. Where nights end early and reality stays obstinately plain. Where you move through beautiful places with beautiful people and not even once feel your hand hover over your pocket, counting passport, phone, pulse. The pill where you don’t confuse adjacency for insight. Because being close to something isn’t the same as living it. Standing near the edge of chaos and stepping into it are not morally or materially equivalent.

It’s easy to flirt with collapse when you know you can leave. When your passport works. When sirens are only interesting sounds, not instructions. I was sitting here, starring at a blank page, quietly cursing a country for not giving me more, when I realized that there is something quietly grotesque about that desire. Wishing for a more “real” experience, when for others that reality is compulsory, exhausting, and ruinous.

I am close enough to touch the myth, far enough to walk away. That distance is everything.

There were times and are places where the red pill is not a metaphor. Across a border, people don’t wake up from the dream. The current situation in Venezuela pressed itself into my thoughts: to yearn for corruption, for instability, felt obscene – selfish, nakedly privileged. There, instability isn’t atmospheric; it’s structural. There is no romance in living inside a system that eats itself slowly, no glamour in scarcity when it isn’t optional, no aesthetic thrill in uncertainty when it governs every decision.

Wanting the red pill is a luxury. It assumes the blue pill is always on the table.

So perhaps the real delusion wasn’t that Colombia failed to live up to the story – but that I briefly wanted it to. That I confused intensity with truth, proximity with understanding, spectacle with substance. Because the most dishonest fantasy isn’t the gangster one.

It’s the idea that this kind of reality could ever be desirable.