In my landscape, there’s an ocean, some cays and shoals, reefs of dead coral, a sixteen-metre hill topped with a church I’ve never been inside and a lagoon deeper inland before you’re out on the open sea again. There are palm trees, mangroves, small red and white crabs, large blue and white crabs, fish, fish, fish. It’s been a long time since I stopped catching hermit crabs and fashioning habitats for them in plastic tubs of Dos Pinos ice cream, or collecting shells, or playing with Soca until I spotted a lizard to kidnap from the clothes on the line. Everything else was the same woozy wash: blue and green, blue and green, blue and green. The setting repeats itself, snagged in the infinite oval of the ring road, where the golf carts lurch around at thirty kilometres an hour, stuffed with drunk, trashy, neon-clad tourists.

Here, everyone loses their mind eventually. And the mind-loser smokes, or drinks, as I drink from this bottle of aguardiente I keep in my backpack. We’re right by the ocean, this beautiful ocean, and we can’t see anything else. Suddenly I’m just trying to protect myself, and I focus on the layer that’s provided everything, food, people, rust, everything, except for the happiness that must be elsewhere. My friends are here on this beach, and almost all of us are leaving, leaving these days behind. The overflowing bags of rubbish that the collectors have refused to pick up because there’s no more room at the dump: left behind. The salty water, the potholes in the narrow roads, the impossible heat under this awful uniform, the songs the Capuchin friars force us to sing, the dizziness of wheeling in a million circles all around the island: it’ll all stay here, in the past that belongs to this place, left behind.

Sure, the city is dangerous. My mum has often told me about taking the bus and feeling a sharp set of nails yanking at the gold chain her father had given her before she left home. Sometimes I think this – plus a man jacking off on another bus – is her only memory of Bogotá.

There’s no other way: I’m going to the ‘centre’, too. That’s where the best universities in Colombia are supposed to be. At night I take over the landline and connect to the internet and study their websites. There are shelves full of books, classrooms with computers, earnest students in discreet study halls. There are colourful gardens with people sprawled out in the grass, offices staffed by men in suits and sleek-haired women, excerpted profiles of professors from England and France. It’s hard to picture myself in these distant images. My imagination strains without the aid of memory.