I accept it: there’s no point in running away from here, fleeing again. Without repairing my own cracks, I’ll be an island wherever I go, clueless and strange; in any new destination, I’ll be set the task of threading together a story that will set me free. I want to be here, want to witness the moment when an invisible finger hits reset. It’s a good time to shoulder my reality: the airport’s been closed for a week, same with the port.

Three hundred kilometres to the southeast of San Andrés, a depression formed and escalated overnight into a tropical storm. It began to move after a spell of stillness, feeding on the ocean’s high temperatures. Danger. That’s how the island’s military authorities reported it, once any plan or evacuation had been judged impossible.

Tropical depression number sixteen was later christened Otto, the name of the first Holy Roman Emperor. Institutions, the institutions that destroy us. The rainfall extinguished the Magic Garden blaze, of course. And then its breezy arms moved its mountains, scattering entire swathes of what we didn’t want across avenues and alleyways. I’d never seen a sadder sight than when the cachaco and I decided to ride our bikes out to kilometre three, to take in another atrocity with our own eyes: the gash in the underwater duct. Pedalling was hard, but it was far harder to see the broken conduit – the tube that evacuates five hundred litres of raw wastewater per second – some five metres from the coastline. We could see the brown stain starkly distinguished from the storm-churned sea. It smelled like a septic tank despite the breeze, and the water that splattered us left us flecked with shit. Repulsed, we rode the three kilometres back. I nearly threw up. At some point along the ride, the dampness inside my raincoat became unbearable, and I felt my vision fogging over – maybe it was my blood sugar, but I didn’t check. I cried, desperate, wheeling past heaps of trash and multi-coloured tyres, the landscape’s newest elements. The whole island, not just me, the whole island, this whole project of progress, is a crack that can open up, gaping, at any moment. A dragging-out with every impulse of the sea.