As soon as I saw that there was no wind to shake the banana fronds against the fence today, I leapt out of bed, excited to return. I passed the sensor over my arm, gave myself my injection and had a bite to eat; within half an hour, I’d reached kilometre ten. I rode with a sense of urgency. I wanted to see the smoke after I passed the landing strip, and here I can see it again through the dry foliage of the almond and mombin trees. I wouldn’t be shocked if I heard a sudden explosion and we were plunged into a health emergency. When I arrived, I took the sensor out of my purse and checked my blood sugar levels after all that pedalling. I’m at 103: good. I opened a bottle of juice: ten grams of sugar. I swapped out my sports bra for a bikini, hoping no one was watching, and took my snorkel and fins out of the basket. The downside of a breezeless day, when you can pedal faster, is that you roast to death. Chaining my bike to a palm tree, I threw myself into the water without looking both ways: jump! I startled some tiny fish as they swam close to the surface. The cool ocean embraces me as I swim and swim and keep swimming, seeking shelter.

To feel a sense of peace, even if I couldn’t see the blaze from here, I’d have to ignore the fact that I was nearly run over by two sewage trucks over the eleven-kilometre ride, heading towards this part of the island to unload, and that I may well be swimming in my own shit at this very moment. I grimace. I don’t think the pollution could be worse here than in the North End, anyway. I plunge underwater and stay there for a bit. Here, it doesn’t smell like the petrol spewed by the jet skis, there isn’t the clamour of the aerobics class on the pedestrian street, I don’t see any tins or lids at the bottom, no suntan lotion floating around the seaweed. What matters most is that I’m alone.

For an instant, I forget it all and my body sinks. My mum would have fretted about the sharks, the barracudas. This area lacks the protection of the barrier reef and any predator could be lurking around my restless legs, she’d say, especially on this shallow ledge – the water’s less than twenty metres deep. Fear, fear, always fear. Two weeks ago, they found a lost Central American caiman wandering around here. But I’m more likely to get ploughed over by a motorboat or killed by a falling coconut – which happened to a tourist recently – than to be attacked by, say, the blacktip reef shark I saw a few days ago, fleeing swiftly through the coral at the sight of me. My mum’s warnings make me laugh. The probability of death isn’t terrifying, just fascinating. What’s terrifying is getting so sick I’m immobilised, confined to a hospital bed, unconscious for days, loitering between nightmares while my body needs assistance to burn through days’ worth of sugar, years’ worth of fears, the secrets of everyone who birthed me, little by little, one generation at a time. I don’t want to think of those awful days, my debut diabetes, passing out after my parents’ funeral – quite the soap opera. Everything they told me after I left the hospital – that’s what scares me, not sharks or angry people. My parents didn’t know a thing. I’m starting to let go of the urge to rail against them for all this, for leaving me in utter solitude, in ignorance. In absolute freedom. Thank you.