My home is a tiny island in an enormous archipelago that isn’t even shown properly on maps of Colombia. Life here is a continual conversation between lethargy and longing. You can feel the passing of time in the rusty metal, in the palm trees bare of coconuts, in people’s leathery faces. I reencountered those faces, those questioning eyes, right after I got back, when I took the wrong road south. Against all expectations, I lost my way in an hour-long oval that leads you right back to where you started. The bus left me somewhere along the ring road, between Morgan’s Cave and the Cove. I had some time to think, walking three kilometres in the blistering heat, until another bus turned off the Tom Hooker route and came my way. The afternoon sun made it feel as if I’d walked three times the distance. As if the island expanded with every step I took, mocking my smallness, the sea perpetually beside and behind me.

The itchy bites on my legs, huge pink circles that shocked me on the first day, are easing after two weeks of attacks. The breeze is damp and cool at this hour. The second-floor balcony in back is my refuge, sheltering me from the heat of the house. I don’t have air-conditioning, but I have whisky. Cheap whisky, Black & White. It’s what they had in the shop. My makeshift table is an old wood-lined speaker. There’s a liquid circle left by the bottom of the glass, wetting a couple of sheets of loose paper I’ve decided to scribble on. I’m just another resident over the course of a long summer, someone else stepping onto the terrace to wipe the sweat off her face as the cicadas start to sing and the wind stirs up the dust from the crowded streets.

A cold sip trickles down my throat. The clink of ice melting in the glass. It’s a sound that brings me modest pleasure now, a calm that unclenches my aching back, slackens my arms. I hear neighs and snorts. The neighbour’s rooster crows at this time of day and any other. He sings whenever he feels like it. The animals announce the darkness and I receive it, drinking so I can drift off among the noises and the little flecks up above, the constellations that stare down at us as they always have, visible here, far from the city.

The city, my new version of hell.