Disunion: Torrey Peters - Exit Plan The U.S. approved of my identity until it didn't.I shouldn't have cared.

DURING THE PANDEMIC, I bought an apartment in Colombia.

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Since then, I've been spending winter and spring there, working toward my Colombian residency, building a potential escape from the U.S. that I hope I will never need. I don't have any previous ties to Colombia, no clear reason to choose this country, except that I feel weirdly at home; it feels like visiting America's distant future, a beautiful country torn apart by a century of failed politics. In Colombia now is the peace after our coming civil war.

To avoid the news at the start of the second Trump administration, I decided to ride a small motorcycle east along the Caribbean coast to La Guajira, a desert on the border of Venezuela. I was scared to do it-people kept telling me I shouldn't ride alone as a woman there: Robberies were frequent on the road past Riohacha. At a gas station, I waited until a convoy of trucks came by and I merged my motorcycle to ride the desert road among them, à la Mad Max.

No one tried to rob me-because of the trucks or perhaps because the road is not so dangerous after all.

In Mayapo, I met a group of kite-surfers, a mix of Wayuu Indigenous people, Venezuelans, and French. They could really put on a show, launching themselves three or four stories above the waves. Even far from the beach, over the metal roofs of the squat buildings between the road and the shore, I'd glimpse the parabola that their bodies sketched across the horizon.