“Stay behind for five years?” I asked.
“You'd be surprised how fast that flies by,” my father said, his eyes wide and bright.
Heart racing, I shifted in my chair. I was thirteen. He wanted me to stay in Trinidad for schooling while my family moved to Venezuela. They moved, and my grades suffered anyway. I was gay, closeted and grew increasingly isolated and desperate.

In SEQUINS MADE FOR SWIMMING, I search for intimacy and trust, but the fear of abandonment follows me. At university in England, academic pressure upends a budding romance and pushes me toward a nervous breakdown. In Turkey, I take risks that nearly cost me my life. And when I fail to land a job in the UK, I head to Florida. Amid a family dispute, I come out to disarm a betrayal and protect my father. But this, coupled with the news of a half-sibling, throws us into such chaos that a counselor moves in to help. We’re quite the household.

For readers of Lamya H’s Hijab Butch Blues, a queer coming-of-age told in linked essays, and Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon, which portrays the cost of claiming independence within a Caribbean family, my memoir-in-essays explores sexuality, disconnection, and how we reach for others while fortressing our hearts against them. Now in my fifties, I look back on decades of performing belonging.