For now, I’ve had enough of home repairs. Before she left, the woman who took care of the house for years helped me clean, find my own sense of order. Most of all, she helped me receive a parade of builders. There were lots of renovations, weeks of dust and exotic conversations that refreshed my coastal accent and local slang. I had the refrigerator fixed, the washing machine, the toilets and the gas stove. I had the façade painted and found a gardener to revive all those tall half-dead ficus trees. After I’d practically begged plumbers, refrigerator technicians, electricians, painters and construction managers, and after a great deal of fruitless waiting around, the basics were up and running. Termites had nested in the utility room and little cockroaches were constantly cropping up in the second-floor bathroom. I called an exterminator on a neighbour’s recommendation and everything ended up coated in oil: walls, ceilings, closets, cooking pots, everything. My hands, my body had never hurt so much. The poison forced me to spend the night in a tent on the upstairs terrace. Finally, we finished washing all the linens and hauling out rubbish bags filled with old notebooks and broken decorations. I took down the religious images from the walls and painted all the walls white. The dropped ceiling is still exposed in one of the bedrooms, awaiting repairs I don’t intend to start right away. In all the commotion – racing upstairs and down, looking for tools, budgeting supplies, fighting with builders – I haven’t had a spare thought for anything but the most pressing tasks. I didn’t come here to yoke myself to all this. I had to stop. The house feels bigger than ever, but now that everything is mine and I can’t possibly fill it, I’m in no mood to make decisions.

Deep down, even before my parents divorced and got themselves killed on a highway in Bogotá, I think this is how I’ve always been: disconsolate. I salvaged a few pages from my school notebooks, written when I thought living here was the worst possible fate, that being surrounded by water was the most horrible situation I could’ve been born to; it was so lonely, never seeing my own features reflected in anyone else’s face, understanding nothing. Here they are, and here comes a long sip that burns my throat. I raise my glass to myself and read them again.