Home in Venezuela

 Leticia’s home in Trinidad was painted a warm mango yellow. She had a balcony where orchids bloomed with a fierceness that reminded her of the mountains outside Caracas. She had a bank account, a reliable car, a refrigerator humming with abundance of things she’d once whispered prayers for. By every measure she had built a life better than many locals ever would, a fact that sometimes filled her with a quiet, disorienting pride, and other times with a low, humming shame.

Her refuge was a coffee shops in and around Port of Spain. Not because the coffee was good but because it was a perfect, sterile nowhere. Here, she was meant to be foreign. The barista, a girl with kind eyes named Anya, knew her order: a tall Pike Place, no room. “Morning, Miss Leticia,” she’d say, the Trinidadian lilt soft as rain. It was love, in its way. Love was everywhere here, from Mr. Khan at the market slipping her an extra sapodilla, to her neighbors inviting her for a loud, joyous religious celebrations she didn’t understand but felt welcomed by.

Yet, wrapped in the generic aroma of roasted beans and steamed milk, Leticia could dissolve. She’d cradle the white cup, a blank canvas, and watch her reflection in the dark window. This was when the ghosts arrived. Not ghosts of people, but of paths. The life she should be enjoying.

In the window’s reflection, she saw not the successful businesswoman in her linen blouse, but Leti, in worn jeans, laughing on the sun-bleached terrace of a café in Altamira, arguing about poetry with friends whose faces were now blurred by time. She saw a version of herself who hadn’t left, who had weathered the storm, who was poorer, more afraid, but rooted. That Leti’s life was woven into a tapestry of shared history, a language of inside jokes and collective memory that required no translation. That Leti belonged in a way Leticia, for all her material success, feared she never could here.

The love she received in Trinidad was real, but it felt like as sunlight is, warm, life-giving, but falling upon her, not emanating from within her. She was an appreciated guest in a beautiful house, but she kept checking for her key, a key that unlocked a feeling she couldn’t name. One Tuesday, Anya was not at the register. A new young man, brisk and unfamiliar, took her order. Leticia felt a small panic. Her fragile ritual was broken. She took her cup to her usual corner, but the spell wouldn’t come. The ghosts were silent.

Frustrated, she looked out the window properly, not at her reflection, but at the street. She saw a woman, maybe from Guyana, struggling with grocery bags and a toddler. Almost instinctively, Leticia stood, walked out, and without a word, took two of the heavy bags.

“Oh! God bless you, darling,” the woman said, her voice rich with a relief so universal it needed no passport.

“It’s nothing,” Leticia replied, her own accent coloring the words.

As they walked to the woman’s bus stop, they talked of the price of onions, the stubbornness of toddlers, the ache in your feet at the end of the day. It was not a conversation of deep connection, but of simple, shared human logistics.

When Leticia turned back to the coffee shop, she didn’t go in. She looked at the mango-yellow house across the street she’d never noticed before. The paint was peeling a little, and a child’s bicycle lay fallen on the walkway.

A realization, soft as a sigh, settled in her chest. The life she should be enjoying was not a phantom life in Caracas. It was not a checklist of cultural competencies or depths of belonging she had failed to acquire.

It was this. This street, this sun, this momentary, unscripted act of carrying a stranger’s bags. It was the love she gave, not just the love she received. Her Venezuelan hands, holding Trinidadian groceries. Her foreignness was not a barrier to the life she should have; it was the very ingredient of the life she was building.

She would probably return to Starbucks. The ghosts were old friends, in a way. But as she walked home to her own yellow house, the key she’d been searching for felt less like an object and more like a motion—the turning of her own hand, reaching out, again and again, to weave herself into the fabric of this new, beloved, and complicated home.